


Come Healing

by BrujaBanter



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (If You Skip The Epilogue), (It Spans Many Years), (It's Sloppy But It's There), (It's the 90s), (Seriously Why Doesn't Anyone Ever Wear Condoms In These Things), (You Gotta Be Careful), (who doesn't love a nice praise kink), Aftercare, Anal Sex, Angst, BDSM, Because There Is Plot, Bondage, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, But Sex Kind Of Is The Plot, Canon Compliant, Choking, Consensual Kink, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub, Established Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, Ethical Kink, First War with Voldemort, Getting Back Together, Healing Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Impact Play, Kink Negotiation, Lie Low At Lupin's (Harry Potter), M/M, Many Kinks, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), NOT PWP, Oral Sex, Orgasm Control, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Power Dynamics, Praise Kink, Rimming, Rough Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Safe Sane and Consensual, Safer Sex, Safeword Use, Safewords, Sex Toys, The Golden Trio Era (Harry Potter), Trauma, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:48:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24904822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrujaBanter/pseuds/BrujaBanter
Summary: They'd never quite intended for kink to be anything more than fun. Then, Sirius went to Azkaban. He comes out a different man, and Remus wonders if they might just use kink for some other purposes as well. In the process, he does some healing of his own.ORThe ways of breaking, reuniting, and healing through sex.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 103
Kudos: 236





	1. Prologue: O Troubled Dust Concealing

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, lovely reader!
> 
> I've been working on this for a while, and I finally have enough of it done to post the first chapter. As of right now, it is six chapters total (but originally it was supposed to be four, so who knows). I have four written already. I plan to post a new chapter each Wednesday, so that I have time in between to write and edit.
> 
> This is a sex and kink heavy fic. Some of the kinks I already know will be explored across this fic are listed in the tags, others will be added as needed. I'm not entirely sure what all will be included. I know for certain there will NOT be consensual non-consent, weapon play of any kind, or scat/watersports (zero judgement on those who enjoy these kinks, I just don't feel I can write them ethically enough). It all falls under the "Safe, Sane, Consensual" umbrella (although I would love for us to interrogate the ableism of using "sane" in this context, but you know), which just means it is ethical and consensual. If you have questions or concerns, pop 'em in the comments! Let's talk!
> 
> This story is mostly canon-compliant, at some (small parts) to the point of using dialogue from canon, and deviating at others (although, I mean, you can’t technically tell me that our boys gettin’ kinky with each other in the background of the books is not canonical). It will NOT explore Sirius's death, so don't worry about dealing with that if it's a deal breaker for you.
> 
> Otherwise, this is a story about discovering, learning, enjoying, and healing from kink, with some plot and angst mixed in (sorry, I cannot help myself). 
> 
> I really, truly hope you enjoy it. Stay safe, love yourselves, wear your masks, wash your hands, hang in there.

When Sirius went to Azkaban, Remus could not stop picturing him in chains.

This was because he was losing his mind.

He knew he was losing his mind because of the scuff mark by the door. It was fifteen-and-a-half centimeters up the wall they’d painted a shade called “Buttered Cream”. He knew this because he measured it, and because Sirius had thrown a fit about why on earth there were so many different shades of white paint and why they were all called such ridiculous things – _“It’s too much dairy in one name, Remus. Just call it ‘buttercream’ and be done with it.”_ The scuff mark looked like a squirrel.

He named the squirrel.

The squirrel’s name was “toucan”. Because at first, he thought it looked like a toucan.

It did not.

It looked like a squirrel.

Six days prior, it had appeared. Its creator was Sirius – or, more precisely, one of Sirius’s black leather Doc Martens, the right one – and Remus knew this because he watched it happen. They say you cannot truly appreciate art if you are witness to its creation, but that didn’t matter, because it wasn’t art.

And also no one says that. It just sounds like a thing someone might say.

So he decided, anyway, that this must have been the reason he couldn’t appreciate it – since he witnessed its creation – and that’s why he hated the mere site of. It should be precious art, priceless art, because Toucan the Scuff Mark was the last thing Sirius made.

But that was not the reason Remus had lost his mind.

The reason Remus had lost his mind was because he could _not stop picturing_ Sirius in chains.

He was sitting, cross-legged, on the hardwood floor opposite the front door. He was wearing khakis. This was odd, because he was not wearing socks, or a shirt, or (he checked under his waistband, just to be sure) boxers.

In his left hand was a cheap Muggle beer.

In his right hand was…oh. Also a cheap Muggle beer. He could have sworn there’d been a cigarette there not a moment ago.

Then again, he was losing his mind.

He sat. And drank. He drank so that he would not think, but the drinking just distorted his thoughts so they became blurry and uninhibited, and that’s when he’d first pictured it: A jail cell, small and boxy with concrete walls and barred windows, a steel bed in one corner and a single, leaky sink in the other. Cold. Dark.

Maybe – hopefully – this image made him positively nauseous. He could remember being sick a number of different times over the past few days, and he’d hoped that this was one of them, and _that_ was why he changed the image. So that it looked less grim, less like a snapshot of the inside of his own wretched soul and more like something he would have seen in the muggle magazine Sirius showed him in seventh year.

He put Sirius in the room.

He chained Sirius’s wrists to the ceiling and his ankles to the floor and didn’t worry about where the holds came from or why a jail cell was equipped for such things. He was sloshed, so he added a cock ring and a collar, matching black leather to go with his boots, and gagged him too. A big, showy thing, red ball too big to fit comfortably in anyone’s mouth, which was half the point. And the chains. Real, metal, soldered together at each seam, clanking dangerously and metallic each time Sirius pulled against them. Sirius was hard, _rock hard_ , leaking from his cock and drooling out the side of the gag, slick with the effort of being Remus’s plaything, his fucktoy, his ragdoll stripped naked and _begging_ for something up his arse and Remus’s cock down his throat…

And that’s when Remus had to stop. Because he was _hard_.

When his mum had gotten sick, and his dad had taken him to see the grief counselor at the hospital in Muggle London, she’d explained to him that grief came in phases. Remus didn’t remember all of them, but he was positively fucking sure that “Aroused by the Image of Your Traitor Boyfriend Bound and Gagged in his Own Jail Cell” was not one of them. (Then again, he hadn’t asked, specifically.)

So he drank some more. And smoked a blunt. And that didn’t help, only made the chains grow tentacles like a Snargaluff plant, and that’s when Remus had realized that six beers and the entirety of a blunt he’d normally share with two other people did not go well together.

Somewhere between trips to the bathroom to piss out the gallons of beer he’d been consuming and short fits of uncomfortable sleep against the arm of the sofa, he’d zeroed in on the scuff mark, hoping desperately that it would distract him from the image. Over the next several days, he named it, hated it, had conversations with it, threw an empty beer bottle at it.

Lost his mind.

It hadn’t worked. When he closed his eyes long enough to contemplate sleep it popped back into his head – messy hair, deadly eyes, sharp, painful marks where the chains dug into Sirius’s skin in a way that would make him hard any time he noticed them afterwards – so he’d stopped sleeping at all unless he was tired and pissed enough to drift off easily. And then, he _swore_ , it started happening when he blinked. Mere milliseconds of darkness in between hazy, dry-eyed staring.

It was somewhere around day eight when he realized he could die right there on that floor, hard and surrounded by empty beer bottles, in the company of a squirrel named Toucan, or he could get the fuck up and get on with it.

People had always underestimated his stubbornness. A great part of him wanted to waste away there, drift into the Great Beyond to be greeted by James and Lily and Peter and hug them and have an absolute joy of a time throwing flaming darts at a photo of Sirius’s head.

But those bloody chains.

They were what did it, in the end. If he was going to survive, he was going to paint. He was going to go to the utility closet and pull out the leftover sodding “Buttered Cream” and take a brush and disappear that scuff mark, and then there would be no last thing. No final creation of Sirius Black to remind him that it was The Final Creation of Sirius Black, and then there would be no ending, and then there would be no jail, and then there would be no chains.

It made sense.

Or maybe it didn’t.

After all, he was losing his mind.

* * *

Here’s what had happened:

The world was ending and their friends were dying and the only thing to be done about it was shag.

So, they did.

They shagged everywhere. The sofa. The bed. The kitchen table. The bathtub. The oversized garden pot on the deck.

They took turns fucking each other, sucking each other, tying each other up, pinning each other down. They licked and kissed and cursed and came, and somewhere around mid-October, it actually stared to work. They were feeling, if not better, then at least marginally decent.

And then James called.

James hadn’t called much recently, it was too dangerous and they were all already on edge, and him and Lily had their hands full with Harry, besides. Remus and Sirius weren’t seeing much of each other – outside of, you know, the shagging – and when they did, they circled each other like suspicious sharks, each waiting for the other to finally reveal their true selves.

They’d begun to hate each other, truthfully. And it wasn’t really even about who was betraying the Order (though that certainly didn’t help). It was about death. It was about the constant feeling – that vampiric feeling that was always in the room with them, breathing down their necks and waiting to catch one of them off guard – that one of them was going to die.

It’s easier, grieving the loss of someone you hate.

So when James called, Sirius went.

He was gone a very long time. When he came back, he was drunk, smelled strongly of whiskey and debauchery and other men. He told Remus about the Fidelius Charm as if he was announcing that it looked as if it might rain outside, and then he promptly threw up on their sitting room rug.

Days later, Remus had Sirius bent over the bureau in the guest room and was thrusting into him in a way that could no longer quite be described as “rough”. It was animalistic. But not in a sexy way. It was animalistic in a creature-trying-to-reproduce-to-prevent-total-extinction kind of way. As if it wasn’t even about the sex anymore, about pleasure, it was just about the physical expression of every terrible thing they couldn’t do anything about.

Remus was _mad_.

Sirius, for his part, was loving it. He’d never quite been able to convince Remus to fuck him as hard as he wanted, always coming up against some version of “no, Sirius, I’ll hurt you”, and it didn’t seem to matter how much he begged or enticed or reminded Remus that he’d taken _much bigger things_ up his arse before. Remus wouldn’t do it. Until that day.

He was dead silent. He jerked his hips into Sirius with all the force of a guided missile, but he made no sound. If Sirius could have seen anything but the detail of the woodgrain atop the dresser they’d purchased at a vintage shop, it would have been Remus’s amber eyes, bulging and unblinking, trained on Sirius’s back like a laser. But not even a moan escaped his lips.

Sirius, on the other hand, was all but _screaming_. He gripped the sides of the bureau for dear life and made noises he’d never made before and said things like “yes, _fuck me_ ” and “make me yours” and, at one point, “harder” (which wasn’t, at the very least, physically possible and would, at most, actually kill him). 

And then his mouth betrayed him, and he screamed something into the small, mostly unused room, and the thing was a name, and the name was not Remus’s.

Whose name it _was_ did not matter. Because Remus _froze_. Balls-deep in Sirius’s arse, he froze, completely, as if hit by a body-binding curse. For the longest ten seconds of Sirius’s life, Remus did nothing. Then, meticulously, he removed his quickly softening cock from Sirius and left the room _to make tea_.

Ordinarily, this might have been charming. Ordinarily, Sirius would have venerated the way Remus was composed and calm, even when Sirius was being a right bastard. But things were not ordinary, and the world was ending, and their friends were dying, and Sirius had had enough.

He did not bother getting dressed completely. He pulled a pair of boxers that may or may not have been his from the drawer and bounded into the kitchen and _screamed_ , but this time not from pleasure.

“ARE YOU FUCKING _KIDDING ME_ , REMUS??”

Remus did nothing, didn’t even flinch, just kept spooning loose-leaf tea into the strainer atop his mug.

“Will you fucking _LOOK AT ME_ ,” Sirius tried again. Remus paused, but he did not turn.

“Look,” Sirius tried, all traces of rationality leaving him. “I may be an absolute wanker, Moony, but what do you think it says about you that I’ve been buggering other blokes for _weeks_ and you haven’t even _noticed_?”

Remus put the lid back on the tea. “I have noticed, actually.”

Remus Fucking Lupin.

“Oh,” Sirius replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Oh, good. I thought maybe you’d just not bothered to get your head out of your own arse long enough to realize.”

The kettle squealed. Remus took it off the stove, poured the steaming water into his mug, took the sugar jar off the shelf.

“So what is it, Moony, huh? Too busy passing secrets to your Death Eater pals to care, I suppose. Maybe you’re having your way with a few of ‘em too, eh?”

For the second time that night, Remus froze. His knuckles turned white around the teaspoon he was holding and began shaking slightly so tiny white crystals bounced off the sides of the spoon and onto the countertop below.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Sirius,” Remus said, his voice steady though the rest of him was very much not.

This was not what Sirius wanted. Sirius wanted Remus to scream, curse, throw things. He wanted Remus to bend him over the bloody kitchen table, fuck him even harder than he was before, punish him for his disloyalty and his distrust and remind him that no one would ever be able to take him apart the way Remus did, no one would ever know him the way Remus did, no one would ever fuck him the way Remus did.

And when Remus did not do any of those things, just kept staring into the tiny leaves of tea floating in hot water, Sirius couldn’t be there anymore. So he went to their bedroom and dressed quickly in jeans and a tee shirt and black boots and a leather jacket. He stomped back through the kitchen, over to their front door, and paused once more before it.

“Tell me that you care,” Sirius said.

Remus said nothing.

It was not that he didn’t care. Remus cared _so much_ about _so many things_ , and none more than Sirius. It was simply that he’d never quite learned how to say it. He’d learned to show it, by slipping his tongue into Sirius’s mouth or binding his hands behind his back or fucking himself into Sirius’s throat. But he’d never learned to _say_ it. So he didn’t say anything. 

Nothing could have broken in that moment that was not already destroyed, but Sirius was angry anyway, angry in a whole new way. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he just kicked, a defeated little thing that didn’t rise but two feet from the ground. His foot landed on the wall next to the door with something between a thud and a squeak, and it was _completely_ unsatisfying, so he just left.

And that was it.

For a long, long time, Remus stared into his tea. It grew warm, and then cold, and still he did not throw it out. He did not move. Time moves slowest when you are doing nothing at all, so he did nothing at all. But time kept moving.

The clock struck midnight.

It was Halloween.

That felt right, really, given how much of a horror show things had become.

And that’s when he noticed the mark.

To be continued. 

Title note:

The fic title and all chapter titles are from Leonard Cohen’s “Come Healing”. I am quite partial to Elayna Boynton’s version, because we stan a Black singer with the voice of an angel. Her version can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOgLZkJC99g), or on the soundtrack to the film “The Farewell”.


	2. Gather Up the Brokenness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, lovely readers:
> 
> Here it is, chapter two! It's a long one; there was a lot to cover here. This chapter moves a bit between Prisoner of Azkaban era (including Remus's perspective on the scene in the Shrieking Shack) and Marauders era, but hopefully it's very clear which is which. There are feelings (I really, honestly cannot help myself), but there is also just some good, old-fashioned, Marauder's era banter and fluff.
> 
> No major content warnings. Note the added tags. The boys are seventeen in some bits of this chapter, which is above the age of consent in the UK but still might be a little eek-y for some readers. Take care of yourselves.
> 
> Again, I very much hope you like it. Comments make my day. Continue to hang in there, wear your masks, wash your hands, love yourselves, enjoy.

There was a time when Remus was appropriately bashful about this. But that, like so very many things, had changed. Back then, he was careful, measured, studious in this as in everything. He had to be talked into pushing boundaries, and even then, Sirius had to walk him, hand-in-hand, over the threshold.

Now, he just pushes men into walls.

 _Consensually_ , of course. Always consensually. But not gently. Not bashfully. He walks across the threshold of pushed boundaries all on his own now, and he usually likes to drag someone (or, occasionally, a few someone’s) with him.

He has a thing for blondes. At least, that’s what you’d have thought, if you lined up every sex partner he’d had over the past ten-ish years (and…don’t, honestly, because Remus didn’t particularly want to see any of them again), but really, he just liked men who didn’t look like Sirius. Blondes were easiest. Even brunettes were off limits, for in the dim light of the dark spaces in which he tended to meet these men, brown hair would hit darkness and it, too, would turn black. So, blondes.

Otherwise, he wasn’t picky. Muggles were easier, because of the whole ignorance-to-lycanthropy bit, and he didn’t much go for the little barely-of-age twinks who loitered around the bars in too-tight jeans waiting for some more experienced man to buy him a drink. So mostly, that left…well…roughly half of the gay male population of Britain. (Blonde hair was in. Remus was glad.)

This one’s name is Floyd. Or…Frederick. He always asks their name – he’s not _barbaric_ – but more often than not, he doesn’t remember it. He does _care_ (he cares so much, about so many things), but in the same way he cares that a lost dog makes it home safely, or a little old lady makes it across the street before the light turns, or that he makes sure to feed the strays that linger near his cottage… 

Okay, so mostly he cares about dogs. Go figure.

He’s remarkably practiced at the conversation now, setting hard limits and safe words and asking what the other person is into and if…well…if they wouldn’t mind being pushed into a wall.

And then they do this dance. This awkward kind of beautiful dance in which nothing is choreographed and everything works out anyway. First, they strip. (Well, the other man strips, Remus stays fully clothed, just pulls out the necessary appendages when the time comes.) Then, he binds them. Then, they kiss. And finally, sometimes thirty seconds later and sometimes thirty minutes, Remus spins them around, and pushes them up against the nearest wall (or, wall-like feature, because they are, sometimes, outdoors) and fucks them against it, hard and rough and very unabashed, and whispers filthy things into their ears and lets them come only when they’ve well and properly begged for it.

That’s what had happened tonight. It was early January, winter break was coming to a rapid close, and he was due back at Hogwarts the next day for his second semester as Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. He was endlessly thankful for the job, but not as appreciative of the way it limited one of his favorite pastimes, so he’d spent every night of break (save the full moon, when he’d curled up into a furry ball of Wolfsbane-induced coherence and waited for the sun to rise) doing exactly this.

“Well fuck, mate,” Floyd says, pulling his trousers back on. “You sure know what you’re doing, eh?”

Remus smiles, but it looks a bit more like a grimace. “Yeah…I suppose I’ve a fair amount of practice. Always helps to have a good scene mate, though.”

He always compliments them. It may or may not be genuine (he doesn’t quite remember what genuine feels like, honestly), but he is still Remus Lupin. He is a shell, empty and scraped out and so light on his feet he might as well not be touching the earth at all, but he is a shell of someone James and Lily Potter used to love and admire and respect, and so he always compliments them.

“Where’d you learn, then?”

The part he doesn’t love is the small talk. Floyd is lacing his trainers now, looks as unconcerned and unaffected as if he’d just sold Remus a life insurance policy, and Remus would just really rather not. He hates these kinds of questions, specifically, the kind that allude to a life outside this moment, in which relationships were built and things were learned. The main reason he has these encounters is to mark a moment, a point in time in which he is alive and he is touching someone’s else’s body and each second that passes puts more time between _then_ and _now_. He does not like to admit that there was a time in which he was younger and more optimistic and less experienced, likes even less to admit that he was markedly not-alone then, and so he does what he does best: deflects.

“Same place as all of us, I suppose.” He prepares to make his exit, smooths his hair and double checks his fly. “Around.”

* * *

They were seventeen, it was the dead of winter, the Prewitt brothers had set the common room curtains on fire, and Sirius had an idea.

These were the facts.

James was nearly doubled over in laughter and Remus was deliberately avoiding the pleading gaze of a thoroughly annoyed Lily Evans when a slightly tippled Sirius sidled up to him and planted himself in the spot on the sofa next to Remus. He maneuvered his head into the space between Remus’s crossed-legged lap and the arithmancy textbook in his hands and looked up at him with wide, earnest grey eyes.

“Oh Moooon-eeee,” Sirius singsonged.

Remus pretended to ignore him, rereading the same sentence for the tenth time now and disregarding Lily’s overheard chastising of James – _“you’re Head Boy, for God’s sake – do something!”_ – but Sirius widened his eyes and protruded his lower lip into the moping pout he _knew_ Remus couldn’t ignore.

“What, Pads?” Remus asked, but refused (at least for now) to put down his book.

“I have an idea,” Sirius said, and something glinted behind his eyes.

Remus sighed a very vocal resignation and threw his head back, discarding the book somewhere in the general vicinity of the coffee table. Sirius’s “ideas” never ended particularly well.

“ _Moony, I have an idea: Let’s throw dungbombs off the astronomy tower and see if we can hit any Slytherins.”_

_“Moony, I have an idea: Let’s ditch potions and go make out in Filch’s office while he’s doing his rounds.”_

_"Moony, I have an idea: Let’s grab Wormtail and Prongs, sneak into Hogsmeade, and see if we can convince Madam Rosmerta to serve us Firewhiskey.”_

Yes, Sirius’s ideas nearly always landed them in detention. Or the hospital wing. Or spending the entirety of the day coming up with excuses to avoid sitting down. (That was the time Sirius suggested they try hovering charms on each other, and James ended up dropping Sirius on his arse, who in turn dropped James, who in turn lost his concentration and dropped Remus, all while Peter stood in the doorframe keeping watch and laughing so hard he was shaking.) 

“What is it, Pads?” Remus asked, faux exasperation not quite disguising his curiosity.

Sirius’s smirk was one of infuriating satisfaction. He slinked out of Remus’s lap and pulled Remus off the sofa by his hands like a toddler with something important to show his mum.

Remus followed Sirius up the stairs (Lily’s increasingly shrill shouts echoing in the hallway) and closed the dormitory door behind them. Sirius threw himself belly-first onto his bed, reaching for something on the bedside table.

Remus laid down next to him and rested his chin in his hand, looking over at Sirius expectantly. “Well?”

Sirius plopped something down on the bed between them with a flourish, as if he was presenting the snitch itself. “Do you know what this is?”

Remus looked at the thin collection of sheening paper between them. “This is a magazine, Pads,” he responded flatly.

“Yes, it is,” Sirius continued, unperturbed by Remus’s lack of enthusiasm. “A _muggle_ magazine.”

“Okay…” Remus replied, wondering if he oughtn’t go back down to the common room and make sure James hadn’t been castrated yet.

“ _Moony_ ,” Sirius said, clearly becoming frustrated at Remus’s lack of excitement over an object found in any muggle waiting room. “Guess what’s _in_ this magazine?”

“Oh I don’t know, Pads, dress patterns?” 

Sirius swatted Remus across the backside, eliciting a squeak. “Moony, Moony, Moony,” Sirius sighed. “So very demure. Look.” He pushed the magazine in front of Remus.

“Sirius, my mother is a muggle, remember? We had these lying around all the ti–”

Remus cut himself off. On the cover of the publication in front of him was a very muscled, very oily, very naked man holding what appeared to be a black riding crop teasingly over his shoulder. Knelt in front of him was a smaller but still rather muscular man clothed nearly head-to-toe in shiny black latex. His hands were tied in front of him with an intricate configuration of rope and he was looking up desirously at the man with the riding crop. Remus’s mouth went dry and he tried to swallow anyway, his throat sticking, as a fluttering bolt of electricity shot from his heart to his groin.

“Pads, where did you find this?”

Sirius curled his lips into a self-satisfied smirk and shrugged. “I have my methods.”

Remus stared at Sirius and tried to swallow again. His mind was positively racing with any number of images and thoughts he couldn’t turn into words if he tried.

“Open it,” Sirius said.

Remus hesitated. His trousers were already feeling uncomfortably tight, and if the blush he could already feel creeping up his cheeks was any indication, he was not going to be able to hide his _interest_ from Sirius much longer.

“Oh for Merlin’s sake,” Sirius said impatiently, snatching the magazine back from Remus and opening it to the cover page himself. “What shall we check out first, Moony? Leather Daddies?”

_What?_

“Bondage?”

_As in…?_

“Fisting?”

 _Is that what it sounds like?_ _Can you even_ do _that?_

Remus was opening and closing his mouth like a guppy. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. It never ceased to amaze him, how casually and comfortably Sirius could bring up things like this as if he was reading through a potions supply catalog. They’d been shagging each other senseless since the end of sixth year, but Remus still wanted to dash behind the nearest statue any time Sirius tried to have a conversation about it. Sirius, on the other hand, would talk about it all day and night if he could. (And, in fact, he often did.)

“What do you reckon ‘felching’ is?” Sirius asked, casually skimming through the pages of the magazine. Remus could see quick flashes of any number of things that both terrified and intrigued him.

“Sirius…” Remus interrupted, hesitantly.

“Here, Moony,” Sirius said, closing the magazine and pushing it back over to Remus’s side of the bed. “Have a look, yeah? See if anything strikes your fancy.”

Remus looked at Sirius, then down at the magazine, reaching towards it slowly and carefully, as if it might catch fire.

Sirius flipped onto his back and gazed thoughtfully up at the ceiling. For several long minutes, neither spoke. Remus thumbed his way through the first few pages, the visuals alone eliciting the most curious effect of combined arousal and nausea. Sirius had begun fiddling with his wand, twirling it gracefully in his hands.

“I think you should tie me up,” Sirius said with all the inflection of ordering a Butterbeer, wand still swirling in between his long, thin fingers.

“You… _what?_ ” Remus responded, when the statement finally made its way from his ears to his brain. He was aware of just how uncomfortable lying on his front was becoming, and he tried to subtly adjust his hips to relieve the pressure on his stiffening cock. 

Sirius stopped playing with his wand and turned back over onto his stomach, now much closer to Remus than he had been before. “I think,” Sirius rested his chin in one hand and began trailing the fingers of the other over the cool linen covering Remus’s back, “You should tie me up.”

Sirius leaned in and pressed a small, rather chaste kiss to the corner of Remus’s open mouth.

“You…you do?” Remus asked, recognizing something like excitement in his own voice. (Or maybe it was terror. Probably it was both.) Sirius’s fingers left a trail of gooseflesh where they grazed over the clothed skin of his back and a small, voltaic shiver ran through his body.

“I do,” Sirius whispered entrancingly into his ear. Sirius’s warm breath lit a small fire in the canal of Remus’s eardrum and his voice was pure silk. Silk, like the maroon and gold tie they wore with their uniforms. The tie hanging unassumingly around one of the posters at the end of Sirius’s bed, just within reach, just the right length to…

Remus attacked Sirius’s lips with his own so quickly he didn’t even have time to register what he was doing. Sirius must have been hoping for this outcome, because he grinned into the kiss, but before he had time to break off and say something snarky to Remus, Remus’s tongue was in his mouth and his hand was in Sirius’s hair, tugging just enough to hold Sirius’s face close to his. Their noses brushed and their teeth clashed and Sirius’s mouth was sour with the taste of cheap Firewhiskey he’d no doubt nicked from Filch’s office, and neither of them cared even a little bit. Remus nipped at Sirius’s bottom lip and Sirius moaned, low and desperate, into the kiss.

“Would you like that, Moony?” Sirius whispered, breaking their kiss only enough to get the words out. “Would you like to see me all tied up just for you?”

Remus growled. He _growled_.

It wasn’t that Remus hadn’t _known_ , exactly, that this was something he might be interested in, it was just that he’d expressly forbidden himself from even fantasizing about it. It wasn’t as if being a werewolf carried with it connotations of gentleness and subservience, as it was, and he wasn’t particularly interested in doing anything that would make him seem more like a homicidal maniac. Every once in a while, though, a fleeting image would cross his mind, one with whips and chains and leather and (more recently) Sirius, kneeling, mouth open, waiting obediently for…

_Fuck it._

He reached for Sirius’s trousers so clumsily that he accidentally slapped Sirius across the face. Sirius just rolled over onto his back, giving Remus full access to his zipper, and began unbuttoning his own shirt.

 _We should probably talk about this_ , Remus thought. _We should probably slow down_ , Remus thought. “Bloody trousers,” is what Remus said. His hands had started shaking uncontrollably at some point and he fumbled futilely at Sirius’s fly.

“Let me,” Sirius said.

Remus conceded and set instead to the work of kissing every available inch of skin now revealed by Sirius’s partially unbuttoned shirt, tonguing and biting at random spots with no particular plan except _Sirius hot mouth now_ and moaning helplessly into the soap-and-liquor scented skin. If Remus had ever been this turned on, he didn’t remember.

“If you don’t touch my cock right now, Sirius Black, my hand to Merlin–”

Just then the door to the dormitory opened, and the boys jumped off each other and away from the bed faster than flying shrapnel, Sirius quickly tucking himself back into his trousers. Peter walked in carrying a pile of books so tall it covered his face and he had to turn sideways to navigate his way around the room.

He plopped the books down on his bed with a thud and turned to them. “Alright?”

“Eh, Peter, mate, mind clearing off so Moony and I can have a little privacy?” Sirius asked, already pushing Peter towards the door with the ease of being a whole foot taller than the runty boy.

“Oh,” Peter said squeakily, “yeah, guess I could go down to the library, or—”

“Great, you’re a dear.” Sirius cut him off, pushing Peter over the threshold and shutting the door behind him. Remus wanted to admonish Sirius for always treating Peter expendably, say something like " _he’s bound to get fed up with it someday, Pads"_ , but all he could think about was how Sirius’s bony, olive-tinted wrists would look tangled in his own Gryffindor tie.

Sirius was back on him in an instant, a mess of hands in hair and clumsy legs stumbling over the kinds of things boys leave lying around, groping again at each other’s groins. Remus closed his eyes, and then opened them, then closed them again, all the time picturing truly devious things. His cock was now so hard despite the interruption that every movement sent firecrackers through his shaft and down his legs to his feet, which had finally collided with Sirius’s bed when…

“Mates, you have to hide me, she’s going to _kill_ me.” James burst through the door, throwing it wide open and standing in the frame like a madman. His always-messy hair was sticking up in twenty different directions and he was red-faced with laughter and energy and probably some semblance of genuine fear.

“James…” Sirius said between gritted teeth, stepping back from Remus only a bit because, sod it, who cares what James saw at that point, he just needed Remus to be inside him in precisely three-point-two seconds or he was going to explode.

“James,” Remus said, annoyingly composed, “think you might go, erm…go deal with this elsewhere?”

“Sorry, lads,” James said, closing the door behind him. “Too late now, girls can come up to our dorms, innit? Something sexist in that, you ask me. Maybe if I point that out to Lily she’ll be too impressed to hex my bollocks off? Course, first she’ll have to untangle Fenwick from the hearth rug – never seen it act that way before…”

James was pacing the room now and ranting in a way that didn’t much seem to need an audience, but Remus and Sirius knew him well enough to know they wouldn’t be getting any privacy any time soon.

Remus pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a defeated sigh, his hard-on waning in disappointment.

“Guess that’s it for that idea.” Remus said, putting his hands on his hips.

“Nah, we’ll just try again later! Or, tomorrow!” Sirius said hopefully. James was still talking a mile a minute, entirely uninterested in the side conversation Remus and Sirius were having mere meters from him.

“When?” Remus asked, annoyed and very, very horny. “We’ve double herbology, then potions, then you have that detention with Slughorn for spiking the second year’s Sleeping Drought with Pepper-Up, _then_ we’ve got to head to the shack before sundown…”

Remus trailed off. Something mischievous and brilliant moved across Sirius’s face.

“Hey, Moony?”

“What?”

“I have an idea.”

After the two hours it took to calm James down, and then the extra forty-five minutes he spent trying to convince Lily that James wasn’t _that_ bad, honestly (she’d disagreed, but blushed nonetheless, and she’d been doing that a lot more recently…) Remus went to the library. He wasn’t actually expecting to find much of anything helpful, but if there’s one thing Remus Lupin was, it was diligent. He’d found no trace of what he was looking for in the general stacks, so he convinced Madam Pince to let him into the restricted section under guise of “extracurricular research” (which wasn’t, technically speaking, incorrect). “Restricted” was restricted for a reason, he supposed, because there was actually an _entire section_ dedicated to what he was looking for. He picked out three particularly interesting looking texts, set them down on the dusty table by the stained-glass window, and got to work.

It was nearly midnight by the time Madam Pince finally shooed him out of the library, and Remus’s head was positively swimming with images and ideas and, yes, responsibly sourced information on safety and etiquette. He made a stop at the prefect’s bathroom to take care of a very eager erection before returning to the dorm, tired and satisfied and more excited for a full moon than he had ever been.

So there they were, three hours to sundown, panting, half-hard, and staring at each other.

Remus had convinced Madam Pomfrey to escort him to the shack early, and Padfoot had followed behind after a while, which had left several minutes for Remus to work himself up into some mixture of panicked and excited and very aroused.

When Sirius showed up, on the other hand, he just began stripping. When he had removed his robes, he untangled his tie, and threw it unceremoniously in Remus’s direction with the general air of starting right where they’d left off.

“Oh! Er…” Remus began, not entirely sure, himself, how to resume. “Right then. I guess I’ll just…” He began fiddling with his own tie.

“I think you should stay dressed,” Sirius said casually as he reached down to untie his saddle shoes.

“You…why?”

Sirius shrugged. “Think it’ll be hot. It’ll be like you’re still totally in control, and you can do whatever you want with me.”

Oh. So Sirius had _thought about this_.

Remus swallowed hard. His cock stirred. The idea of a fully naked Sirius, tied up and completely at his control, while he remained all dressed and composed and watched Sirius come undone beneath him…

He was certainly not opposed to the idea.

He wanted to say “oh hell yes”, but what he actually said was, “Yeah, okay.”

Sirius grinned at him and continued undressing with all the shamelessness of being seventeen and horny and very regularly complemented on his appearance. Remus didn’t know what to do, so he fiddled with Sirius’s tie, tying and untying it into various knots and wondering what those knots were going to look like around Sirius’s wrists.

When he was entirely nude, cock flagging half-erect, Sirius simply laid back on the bed and raised his arms to the rich mahogany headboard, practically begging Remus to tie his wrists there, and it took every single ounce of self-control Remus had constructed over twelve years of lycanthropy to not do exactly that, exactly then. 

“Weneedtotalkaboutthis–” Remus said in a single breath, so jumbled and fast that Sirius tilted his head to the side, just like the dog he really kind of was.

“What was that, Moony?”

“I think…” He took a very long, very deep breath. “I think we should talk about this. You know, before we…before.”

Sirius gave him a very amused look. “ _You_ think? We should _talk_ about this?”

Remus nodded.

“M’kay,” Sirius said, bringing himself to a seated position. “Let’s talk about it.”

Sirius did not back down from _any_ challenge, whether it be an impossible prank or a difficult arithmancy problem or, yes, his awkward, fumbling, adorable boyfriend suggesting they _talk about_ sex.

Remus, though, said nothing. He had precisely no idea where to begin.

“What do you want to talk about, Moony?” Sirius asked, flirtatiously. “Do you want to talk about how hard I was all of today thinking about being all tied up for you?” Remus’s mouth dropped open. “Or do you want to talk about how hard I want you to fuck me when I can’t do anything about it? Or maybe…” He lifted himself onto his hands and knees and began _crawling_ towards Remus. “Maybe you want to finally tell me about all the ways you’ve wanted to make me yours, huh? How badly you sometimes wish you could just force me to my knees and fuck my mouth so I have no choice but to take it?”

This really wasn’t fair, this close to a full moon. Remus was going to squirm directly out of his skin if Sirius didn’t stop talking right that very second (which maybe would have been fine, because his cock was now uncomfortably hard in his trousers).

“We need a safe sword,” Remus said clumsily.

Sirius quirked an eyebrow. “A what?”

“A word.” Remus forced his mind to slow down. “We need a safe word, Sirius. In case you want me to stop or untie you or…something.”

“Oh,” Sirius replied easily. “I don’t think I was planning on asking you to stop, Moony.”

Holy Merlin.

“Just in case, Pads,” Remus replied, though he had to actually look away from Sirius to do so. “Like in case I’ve tied your wrists too tightly and you start to lose circulation…or something.” This conversation was becoming decidedly un-sexy.

“Okay…” Sirius was enjoying this far too much. “How about, ‘Hey Moony, you’ve tied this too tightly and my hands are about to fall off,’ would that work?”

“N-no, I think it’s supposed to be a specific word. The book said–”

“The _book_ said?”

“Well, yeah. I…I went to the library.”

“You went to the _library_? For _this_?”

"It didn’t seem… _responsible_ to just dive into it, Padfoot!” He accidentally screamed it but Sirius seemed nothing less than positively amused. He raised himself up onto his knees, and pulled Remus into a long, shallow kiss.

“Okay, Moony,” He said, a little bit of admiration creeping into his voice. “We can have a safe word. How about…'Snape'?”

Remus choked on an unexpected laugh. “Christ, Pads, we’re trying to slow down, not lose the desire to have sex ever again.”

“Right,” Sirius replied. He thought for a moment longer. “How about ‘hippogriff’?”

Remus didn’t know where that came from, or why, but it seemed simple and non-sexual enough. “Sure, okay. ‘Hippogriff’ it is, then.”

“Great!” Sirius sat back on his haunches, and gestured vaguely with his hands. “So can we…”

“Oh, yes, right!” Remus took just a moment to be adequately proud of himself for managing to make it through that admittedly short conversation, and allowed it to relax him enough for his heart to stop pounding quite so loudly and remember what it was they were doing here. The slippery silk of the maroon and gold tie glided through his hands, and in an instant, Sirius had reclined on the bed once again, wrists just as ready and eager as they were before.

Neither of them had ever done this, so it took them a moment to figure out the best configuration, but they ultimately landed with the tie wrapped around each of Sirius’s wrists individually, then placed through two of the decorative carvings in the headboard and secured in an amateur series of perfectly effective knots.

Remus sat back to admire his work. If he had known prior to this encounter that the only thing he wanted out of life was to see Sirius bound and willing beneath him, he wasn’t aware of it, but suddenly he was pretty sure he could die tomorrow and he wouldn’t care, so long as nothing interrupted what he was pretty sure was about to happen. He suddenly wanted to do _all kinds of things_ with Sirius ( _to_ Sirius? That didn’t feel quite right…) starting with running his hands over every single available inch of Sirius’s body.

He reached down tentatively, starting at the dip just above one of Sirius’s prominent collarbones, and trailed awkward, fingers – long and lanky and unsure, just like the rest of him – over the curves of Sirius’s shoulders. The stark contrast of the crisp white linen of Remus’s school shirt against the warmth of Sirius’s tan skin and the jet-black hair on his torso…Remus could barely think, could barely do anything but continue moving his fingers down Sirius’s _unbelievably_ smooth arms, down the hard bone of his sternum and over precious skin and _oh_.

His eyes caught the trail of dark black hair that led to Sirius’s cock, so pink and full and _rock fucking hard_ and some locked thing in the back of Remus’s mind snapped – actually made a little _ping_ kind of noise – and something like fire or acid or pure electricity shocked him in the center of his chest. He was _allowed_ to do this. Sirius _wanted him_ to do this. Sirius was… _incredibly turned on_ by him doing this, and if all that was the case, then Remus was going to…

“Sirius, you have to–”

“Stop talking.”

Sirius Black was not usually one to obey orders. He, in fact, had a very carefully constructed reputation borne of _not_ taking orders. But he closed his mouth so quickly someone might as well have hexed it shut, and looked up at Remus as if he was the only thing in the world that existed.

Their eyes met, and something unspoken but very, very clear flashed between them. Sirius made a little nod, something like _yes, you really can_ , and Remus threw his legs over either side of Sirius’s torso and brought his hands to either side of Sirius’s jaw before leaning down to kiss him.

The angle wasn’t quite right, and Remus’s mouth landed a bit further down Sirius’s face than he intended, but that didn’t matter because Remus had every intention of licking Sirius positively everywhere. He trailed his tongue over Sirius’s bottom lip and into his eager mouth, where they tangled their tongues together for only a moment before he brought his mouth to Sirius’s cheek, and then down his jaw, and then to the small, sensitive area of space behind his ear.

“ _Fuck_ , Moony…that feels– ”

Remus shot straight up, holding Sirius’s jaw firmly in one of his hands. “I didn’t say you could talk, Padfoot.”

_What? Where the fuck did that come from?_

Remus shook his head a bit, focused his eyes on Sirius and was about to apologize, say, exactly, “I have no idea where the fuck that came from,” but Sirius had gone completely red, a dark, hot color that shot up his cheeks and down his chest and stopped at the hips that he was now _thrusting_ into the air, seeking some friction for his cock which was now somehow even more aroused and leaking from the tip.

Sirius opened his mouth to say something, but Remus had just told him not to, so instead he made the filthiest, neediest sound Remus had ever heard and tilted his head into Remus’s hand.

“You…” Remus began, feeling like he was in some very foreign land and wanting, desperately, to see what he could find there. “You won’t talk unless I say you can,” He continued, voice stronger than he thought it was going to be. “Otherwise…otherwise I’ll have to gag you.”

Again, _what?_

Remus was blushing from sheer embarrassment, but Sirius was moaning again, high pitched and eager, and nodding his head so quickly it nearly blurred the shapes of his features. His eyes were huge, the grey of his irises almost completely eclipsed by his pupils, and he was biting the inside of his bottom lip.

“Good then,” Remus said, still feigning some kind of confidence but feeling it slowly become more and more real the longer he watched Sirius come completely undone beneath him.

He wasn’t entirely sure what to do next, so he brought his mouth back to Sirius’s neck and began licking and sucking small marks in no particular pattern, each one eliciting a sharp sound from Sirius’s mouth. He licked a line down the center of Sirius’s sternum, over to one pert, brown nipple, which he sucked into his mouth. Sirius bucked his hips off the bed and groaned, so Remus threw caution to the wind and bit, just slightly, glancing up at Sirius’s face to see how he was responding. 

All signs pointed toward Go, so he bit down a bit harder, taking the small bit of pebbled flesh between his front teeth and flicking his tongue between them to graze just the tip. Sirius keened again, and jerked his hips off the bed higher, and so Remus bit down a little harder, wondering _just how far_ he could go before Sirius gave him some indication of “stop”.

Remus chickened out before Sirius did (which was, really, rather unsurprising) and instead repeated the same motions on the opposite nipple once he began to wonder if nipples could bleed (he made a mental note to look that bit up later) before moving on and planting a line of slow kisses down Sirius’s belly.

Remus had always enjoyed being a bit of a tease, dragging Sirius to the edge of climax and then pulling him back before he fell over it, but it suddenly occurred to him that he could use the entire remaining two-and-a-half hours until sunset to do _whatever he wanted_ to Sirius. The thought made him lightheaded and dizzy (probably due, in no small part, to the vast majority of his blood having pooled somewhere in the region of his groin).

He reached for Sirius’s cock as if this was the first time he’d ever touched it. In some ways, it felt like it was; the skin felt different, somehow, more velvet and heat and less flesh and blood. The glistening skin of the head peaked out from the sheath of foreskin, and the precum accumulating at the slit felt slippery and warm, a physical indication of how much Sirius enjoyed being at his mercy. The purplish pink shaft stood hard and full in a way that would have looked angry and uncomfortable if Remus wasn’t absolutely positive Sirius was _loving_ this slow, teasing torture.

“Pads,” Remus said, positioning himself lower on the bed, stroking his hands gingerly over Sirius’s cock and glazing his eyes up and down the figure of Sirius’s sleek body, coated in a thin layer of glistening sweat, all bound and obedient and yielding, to _him_. “You’re beautiful.”

Sirius, who had been squeezing his eyes shut in an effort not to thrust into Remus’s hand and positively _beg_ him for more, opened his eyes and looked directly at Remus.

He’d never said this before. He’d never really said anything like it. They traded romantic witticisms and thinly veiled compliments, Remus’s always tinged with dry sarcasm while Sirius’s were earnest and unabashed. He’d _known_ Sirius was beautiful, obviously, had known it as soon as he laid eyes on the boy in first year, but he’d never said it. It would have felt awkward, inauthentic, but right that moment, Remus said it as if he’d never meant anything more in his entire life.

Sirius opened his mouth to say something, but Remus cut him off. “Don’t speak. You’re just…I just…”

He didn’t know how to finish the sentence, so instead he dipped his head to trail his tongue through the suddenly irresistible accumulation of precum. Sirius hissed and arched his back of the bed, not normally quite so sensitive to such small touches but suddenly feeling as if his entire body was torn open, his skin replaced with nothing but nerves and heat and reception to Remus’s touch.

With one small taste of something so innately Sirius, Remus craved more. He circled his fist around the base of Sirius’s erection and held it there, steady and firm, both teasing Sirius with the pressure and knowing it would prevent him from climaxing too soon.

He brought his mouth to Sirius’s cock once again and was about to take it eagerly into his mouth when a thought occurred to him.

“Padfoot,” He said, rather more sternly than he thought he was capable of. Sirius met his eyes. “You aren’t to move. Do you understand?”

Sirius hesitated. He wasn’t sure he was _capable_ of not moving. Still, he nodded obediently, knowing that for Remus, he could. He would.

“Good boy.”

Remus had meant the endearment to be more of a pun than something actually erotic, but it didn’t work, because Sirius positively _whimpered_ the second it had reached his ears. He didn’t move, but he bit his lip significantly harder and nodded voraciously once again.

Remus smirked, a bit too proud of himself, and licked a single stripe from the base of Sirius’s cock to the head, swiping it once again over the slit where more precum was already gathering. Without anything to grip, Sirius simply balled his hands into tight fists and pressed the half-moon-shaped indentations of his nails into his palms.

Remus repeated the motion several times more, eagerly swirling his tongue around the sensitive area just below the head of Sirius’s cock on each upstroke, until he finally relented to the desperate keening and took the head into his mouth. He began to suck, hard, wondering just how quickly he could get Sirius right up to the edge of climax.

“Moon…..ungh,” Sirius whimpered, remembering his orders and trailing the name into a protracted moan, hoping Remus wouldn’t notice and punish him by removing that beautiful, beautiful suction from his very needy cock.

Remus looked up at him warningly, but did not remove his mouth, instead taking much of Sirius’s length into his throat before his lips collided with his own fingers wrapped around the base. Experimentally, he increased the pressure with his hand, and began moving his fist in time with his mouth, flicking his tongue expertly over the head on each upstroke.

When he was sure Sirius was as close to orgasm as he wanted to risk, he pulled off Sirius’s cock with an intentionally audible pop. Sirius whined, but had the composure to remain otherwise silent.

_We can’t have that, now, can we?_

The thought flashed through Remus’s mind, and this time he didn’t try to force it down, opting instead to try riding it like a particularly violent wave, taking him whichever direction it was already going.

He smirked at Sirius and dove in again, this time making sure to be a bit less finessed, more spit and teeth and enthusiasm. He’d never stopped to think about it much beyond the context of fodder for a quick morning wank (which, admittedly, happened often), but the way Sirius felt in his mouth was intoxicating. Smooth, like the rest of his skin, but firm and heavy, he let the feeling of it on his tongue guide him through slow, languid up-and-down movements. The familiar sounds of Sirius’s impending climax reached his ears again, and again he removed his mouth on an upstroke with a spit-slick pop. He kept his fist firmly around the base, but brought his other hand to Sirius’s hip to stroke slowly, comforting and riling all at once.

“You know, Padfoot,” He said, voice hoarse from effort and significantly more confident now. “I think I could probably do this all night.”

Sirius began to shake his head, but threw it back instead against a dusty, satin pillow as Remus sunk down onto him yet again. Sirius pulled at his restraints, the amateur rope suddenly feeling so very binding, indeed.

Remus worked slowly, patiently, fist still firm around Sirius but moving up and down _just enough_ to build Sirius back up again. He brought his free hand up to Sirius’s nipple and began rolling it in his fingers in time with his movements.

“Fucking…Moony, stop _teasing me_ ,” Sirius said, after a particularly skilled swipe of Remus’s tongue under the head of Sirius’s cock.

Remus looked up at him forebodingly and moved off his cock slowly, a patient disciplinarian. “Now Padfoot,” He said evenly. “I believe _I_ am the one in charge here, am I not?”

For a split second, Sirius wanted to protest. But that _look_ behind Remus’s eyes, that look of pure power and authority and control, washed over him and he conceded, nodding.

“And I believe _you_ were the one who wanted to be tied up, were you not?”

Sirius nodded again.

“ _And_ ,” Remus began trailing his fingers down the inside of Sirius’s thigh. “I believe I told you _not_ _to speak_.” Remus punctuated each of the last words with a kiss to the seam between Sirius’s thigh and his hip, and gesture which, _damn him_ , only made Sirius open his legs wider.

Remus took this as an invitation to bring one of Sirius’s balls into his mouth, sucking and prodding at the delicate skin with his tongue, and then the other. Sirius returned to moaning shamelessly into the increasingly thin air between them. He tasted of sweat and musk and salt, and Remus wanted to follow that taste, see just how far it went. He glanced up at Sirius, shining grey meeting rich amber with a new kind of intensity, and repositioned himself so he was lying on his stomach. Firmly, he pushed Sirius’s legs even further apart, and pressed his tongue to the skin just under Sirius’s scrotum, skin he had only ever stroked with his fingertips and, even then, only briefly.

“ _Oh_ ,” Sirius moaned, and Remus had no choice but to mimic him, no choice but to trail his tongue even lower.

Remus closed his eyes against the overwhelming sensations of uncharted flesh beneath his tongue and the heady scent of Sirius. He felt drunk, intoxicated by the way the muscles of Sirius’s thighs clenched in the hands still holding them firmly apart, a conflicting tension of _stay open_ and _close off_ all in one, and this must have been why he didn’t even hesitate before running the flat of his tongue over Sirius’s entrance like he was licking a damn lolly. And Sirius was just as sweet, just as decadent, so he held his tongue there and groaned, feeling as if – surely – this was, indeed, the best idea Sirius had ever had.

Sirius, for his part, must not have been expecting this, because he was making noises the likes of which neither of them had ever heard before. Remus responded by moving his tongue up and down the puckered skin, his own clothed hips now bucking slightly into the mattress for friction. He may have done this for few seconds or several minutes, but by the time he lifted his head again to look at Sirius, Sirius’s chest was slick with the effort of pulling against his restraints and Remus chin was slick with his own saliva. For a moment, they just stared at each other, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, sharing in the newness of the experience.

“ _Fuck_ , Sirius.”

It was not eloquent, all tinged with hoarseness and arousal and something probably decidedly un-dominant, but Sirius just nodded in agreement.

“I _have_ to fuck you,” Remus said, and he found that it was entirely true. “Can I fuck you, Pads? Please?”

This was new to both of them, indeed, but Remus was pretty sure _he_ was not supposed to be the one begging. In that moment, though, he also could not have cared less, his cock hard and aching with the need to feel the skin he’d just _tasted_ for the first time around his cock, enveloping him.

“ _Yes_ ,” Sirius said, both of them forgetting his directions. “Yes, please, Merlin– _fuck me_ , Moony. Please.”

(If they were both begging now, did that make up for Remus’s slip?)

Remus removed his wand from his trousers long enough to hold it to the juncture of Sirius’s legs and mutter a sloppy but effective lubrication charm before he was removing his own clothes with as much finesse as if they’d caught fire. Sirius watched him intently, chewing on his lip as he did, and when Remus slipped one finger easily past the spit-slick muscle of Sirius’s entrance, all bets were off. He may have forgotten his directions completely or he may just not have fucking cared, but Sirius began mumbling a constant stream of utter nonsense as Remus prepared him quickly, slipping two, and then three fingers into Sirius’s tight opening and scissoring them very inexpertly, gliding them over Sirius’s prostate at every opportunity.

“Fuck’s sake, Moony,” Sirius whined, “ _Fuck me_.”

Remus was seventeen, and now only two hours from a full moon, and _very_ turned on, and surely this was why he dropped all pretense of control and instead slicked his own cock quickly and entered Sirius as if he would positively _die_ if he didn’t.

The sound that escaped both of their mouths wasn’t exactly sexual – or, really, human, for that matter – but moments later they were rutting against each other like the hormonal adolescents they both were, Remus driving into Sirius only to have Sirius meet him halfway with his own desperate movements. Neither of them knew when, but at some point, the restraints around Sirius’s wrists must have come loose (they’d only used a flimsy piece of silk, mind you, and an un-enchanted one at that), because Sirius was clawing at Remus’s chest as if _he_ were the one about to turn into a rabid beast.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Sirius was chanting – or maybe it was Remus…or maybe it was both of them – and when Sirius circled his own cock with his fist, it took him all of three more thrusts until he was shooting long, sticky ropes of cum onto his belly in an orgasm that shot through him and then pooled somewhere in his groin, so that the feeling of Remus’s hot cock still thrusting intently into his body felt like pure bliss.

Remus looked positively entranced, gazing down at Sirius as if he were the most fascinating thing in the world, and without thinking about it, he brought one hand to Sirius’s face to stroke his cheek reverently and softly, in contrast with the sharp and increasingly erratic movements of his hips.

“You’re _beautiful_ ,” He said again (because once something is said, it’s so much easier to repeat it) and when Sirius just grinned back at him, he released his own climax deep into the recesses of Sirius’s body. 

Remus managed to shift his body enough that when he collapsed with the effort of the past hour and the aftereffects of his climax, he landed next to Sirius rather than on top of him. He threw his arm over his eyes, and Sirius turned his head and nibbled playfully at Remus’s shoulder before resting his head atop it.

After several moments, rapid pants turned to slow, contended sighs. Remus was trailing his fingers absentmindedly over Sirius’s neck.

“Dunno why you ever question me, Moony,” Sirius said with a final, satisfied sigh.

Remus just chuckled. “Do I need to remind you of last term, Padfoot?” He replied, pinching the back of Sirius’s neck playfully. “Would you like me to ask James to recount just how long it took for the Veritaserum to wear off? What was it you said you used to practice kissing on, a plush dragon…?”

“Yes, yes, alright.”

They lay comfortably for quite some time, until the sunrays through the boarded-up windows slowly crept further and further up the bed, over their sated bodies and across the lines of their contented faces, and they could no longer pretend like sundown wasn’t fast approaching. 

“We’ve got to get up, Pads,” Remus said regretfully, tapping Sirius on the shoulder. “Unless you want Wormtail and Prongs to see us like this.”

“And what if we don’t?” Sirius said, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. “What if we just let them find us here?”

Remus smiled affectionately at his boyfriend. “Don’t make me slap you.”

“You’re right,” Sirius said, shooting a quick wink at Remus before throwing his legs off the side of the bed and reaching for his shirt. “We’ll save that for next time.” 

* * *

He didn’t think it was possible for the Shrieking Shack to get dustier.

Back when they were in school, they’d marvel at how dirty the shack could get in only a month’s time. Peter – ever the sycophant, trying to please in any way possible – would spell away the bulk of the surface dust when they made it to the poor excuse for a house just below sundown. Eventually, though, even he stopped trying. It never took, and they spent most of their time trampling through the forest anyway, gathering more dirt they’d later carry back on matted fur and damp paws.

But each time, when they’d return to the shack in time for Remus’s transformation back to man, Sirius would charm away just enough grime to make space for a magically enlarged cushion for Remus to lay on as he recovered. He knew it didn’t make a difference – the cushion always came away dark red with blood or dark brown with forest dirt or some off-putting combination of both – but he did it anyway. It was an act of friendship at first, and an act of love later, and then an act of reverence at the love and friendship combined.

The first thing Remus notices when he walks through the cramped passage from the Whomping Willow and into the shack for the first time in over fifteen years is that it is dirtier than ever. His wand is drawn, and he’s positively dripping sweat from the anticipation of the meeting and the journey to the shack (he tells himself it’s more the latter, really it’s more the former). He can’t fully wrap his head around the last few weeks, the last few hours, around what he knows he is about to see. He is somehow half-hard, and _that_ isn’t normal, surely.

And the first thought that comes to mind has to do with housekeeping.

He shakes his head in an accidentally perfect impression of Padfoot shaking off dog-stenched rain and tries to refocus. This is more complicated now. This is _more_ complicated now, that’s saying something. But now there is Harry, and Hermione and Ron. Peter. Explanations. Time. (Erections?) Pain. Longing. Children.

 _Right, children_.

Is he scared? He could never bring himself to be afraid of Sirius, even after the prank, even after any number of rather thoughtless childish fights, even after… _after._ But his heart is pounding so hard he can feel the rush of it in his ears as he walks slowly and deliberately to the rickety staircase. He can hear voices now, and it takes him a moment to realize the voices are calling to him.

“We’re up here!” One of the voices shouts, and he recognizes it as Hermione’s. She yells something else, something he doesn’t hear over the pounding of his own heart, and begins running up the precarious staircase, thoughts of _protect_ and _Sirius_ and _Harry_ now taking over.

He reaches the top of the stairs and moves quickly towards the room the voices are coming from. _Our room._ There is a split second, no more than a long exhale of nervous breath, but in it Remus has many thoughts. _He’s in there_ melds into _Harry’s in there_ melds into _Harry doesn’t know_ melds into _can’t lose him again_ , and suddenly things become very lucid. He can smell fear, and anger, and Sirius. He can hear every breath drawn beyond the closed door. And he knows what he has to do.

He raises his wand and throws the door open with soundless, sloppy magic that causes red sparks to shoot from the tip. He looks but doesn’t see, looks at Ron lying bleeding on the grimy bed, and Hermione, small and frightened in the corner, and Harry, red-faced and fuming and determined – _just like James –_ wand pointed directly at Sirius.

Sirius is here. If Remus couldn’t see him, he could smell him, even through the layers of dirt and sweat and sea water. If Remus couldn’t smell him, he could feel him, the way that the tiny molecules in the air vibrate just a little quicker and it does something to the magic inside him, something that flashes hot and red like the sparks that came from his wand only moments before.

 _Children_.

“Expelliarmus!” Remus shouts without thinking, pointing his wand at Harry because all that needs to happen right now is for Sirius to be safe for a few moments longer. Harry’s wand, as well as the two wands he didn’t notice Hermione was holding, fly at Remus and he catches them will all the precision of an athletic boy who never wanted to be an athlete.

He thinks maybe he isn’t breathing, but he moves deeper into the room, so he must be. He can feel a precise and otherworldly nothing. He is floating somewhere above his body, the aches and pains of the approaching moon are gone and all he can feel is _Sirius_. He finally trains his eyes on the outline of the man lying on the floor in front of him – because that’s all this man is, just an unfinished silhouette of a beautiful idea – and the floor drops out from below him. He thinks he might be sick, but that would require a body, and he doesn’t have one of those right now.

His brain is battling with his heart, because his eyes are telling him he knows this man and his heart is telling him he can’t possibly. The Sirius who lives in Remus’s memories, in his very _flesh_ , is alive and full and brimming with everything that is real and good, but the man in front of him now on the dirty, dirty floor is dead. Not physically, not yet, but is so skeletal he might as well be and the air around him feels the same in some ways, but in others it feels dangerous and sick and grotesque. This maybe-Sirius has a black eye and blood is steadily trickling from his nose and, ironically, this is the only part of this man that reminds him of Sirius, all the times Sirius came back to the common room after a scuffle with the Slytherins or a bludger to the eye.

Suddenly, Remus is mad. Suddenly, Remus is _furious_. There are so many things he can’t understand no matter how hard he tries, but he _knows_ Peter is in the room with them, so without breaking eye contact he says, “Where is he, Sirius?”

His voice is not his voice, of course. It shakes with anxious, fearful, _hateful_ love.

Remus knows this man in front of him cannot really be Sirius, because its face betrays nothing. Sirius’s face used to dip into the shadows and light of everything Sirius said, everything he felt. But this man’s face is stoic, his body so frozen that it takes Remus a moment to notice it raise one bony, skeletal hand to point across the room.

Remus follows the gesture with his eyes to where it lands on the shaking, injured Ron. Things are starting to fall into place, possibilities bubbling up where they were once doused, but it’s been twelve years of thinking something very different. Remus must be back in his body, because he can feel a swarm of cicadas flying around in his head.

“But then…” He looks back to the man who may be Sirius, “Why hasn’t he shown himself before now?” His brain is stringing sentences together before the thoughts attached to them can catch up with his cognitive processing. The room is very hot. The tattered clothing this maybe-Sirius wears are _prison_ robes. And something very significant clicks into place.

“Unless…” Remus feels his eyes widen. He didn’t tell them to do that. “Unless _he_ was the one…unless you switched…without telling me?”

And then it happens. Remus is flittering his eyes back and forth between this imposter Sirius and Ron when he finally notices where Ron is laying. Despite nearly two decades of dust and grime and inattention, it looks the same. It’s so big that Ron looks several years younger atop it, and tiny patches of crimson silk peak through the layers of dust where the recent movement of bodies has cleared a path. Each of the four posters stands as tall and steady as before. The beginnings of a vision form in his mind, visions of this very bed and Remus and this man who _is_ Sirius no matter how much he wants to deny it. Sirius is nodding an affirmative to Remus’s question, eyes positively unblinking. Now Harry is saying something that sounds like white noise in the background of the cicadas in his head, who are now hungry and angry and growing in size. Nothing is real, nothing makes sense, these can’t possibly be the same worlds. Time has split, into an infinite cataclysm where the horrible moments are the real ones and the beautiful moments will always exist in some existential _before_.

Remus turns back to Sirius and walks closer to him. It is as if his unconscious now has enough pieces of a terrible puzzle to fit them all into place. Remus can see Sirius now: the proud, prominent cheekbones of the Black family, protruding where they used to be cushioned by delicate baby fat. The grey eyes that have dulled with the effect of being shut more often than they are open. He reaches for Sirius, and has a fleeting moment’s worry that Sirius won’t reach back. But he does, and Remus helps Sirius to his feet, and pulls him into the embrace of twelve years of lightyears-wide absence.

The cicadas quiet a bit. There is so much more that has to be explained, done, dealt with. But now, Remus supposes, they’ll do it together.

To be continued.


	3. And Bring It to Me Now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, sweet readers!
> 
> Welcome back to me not knowing how to write short chapters! 
> 
> Personally, Lie Low at Lupin’s are some of my favorite Wolfstar fics, but they don’t often have the depth of emotion I want. Like, these boys were in love, more or less betrayed each other, spent fourteen years living apart (one of them in a maximum-security prison being tortured by soul-sucking monsters) and then just…come back together and forgive each other and fuck? Nah. I have this thing about fics/books/shows/etc. that don’t acknowledge that trauma doesn’t just…go away. So, while I didn’t necessarily INTEND to turn this into a 12,000-word manifesto on the nuances of the aftermath of complex trauma…um…here it is anyway. There is lots of sex and kink and sarcasm thrown in there, too.
> 
> There is the TINIEST BIT of Dumbledore-bashing in this chapter, but it’s really incredibly small and, my own feelings about Dumbledore aside, I do think it’s a fair characterization to assume Remus Lupin would hate platitudes (except for that one time in the last movie where he said something about quality of conviction versus size of army or something like that, THAT was weird.) Otherwise, heed the tags, and there’ll be no surprises. 
> 
> I can’t thank you enough for your comments and kudos, it is such a joy knowing this weird little fic is making even one single person happy. As always, wear your masks, wash your hands, love yourselves, take care of your souls, and enjoy!
> 
> P.S. I don’t know what 2020 is, but I very recently got a Tumblr (???). If you’re so inclined, you can find me there @BubbeBruja.

Three things happen at once: the kettle squeals, someone knocks on the front door, and Remus bangs his head against the bottom of the kitchen sink.

It is entirely _in character_ that he immediately swallows the curse words that threaten to escape his mouth, even though no one would hear him and he is a grown man and that fucking _hurt_. But he just hisses through his teeth instead, and begins to extract himself (more slowly this time) from where he has been sitting on the floor, front half of his body crouched into the cabinet space that houses the sink plumbing. The faucet began leaking yesterday, and he decided it was more practical (see: distracting) to try to fix it with a good old Muggle wrench before resorting to magic.

He takes his precious time turning off the stove and removing the kettle, wiping his wet hands on the tea towel next to the sink, and staring down at his socks. Maybe he’ll let whoever’s at the door think he isn’t home. Maybe he’ll make him wait, make him count up the hours and minutes and seconds as if they mean anything at all and then start back at zero when the numbers get too pathetically high. Maybe he’ll pretend to have been out, at the market, perhaps, or browsing the small bookstore in town, or seeing someone. Yeah, seeing someone. A friend maybe, the ambiguous kind, the kind your mates prod you about and you blush and shrug and say “yep, just a friend” and you both know that you don’t mean it.

Or maybe he’ll head upstairs, muss his hair, put on a sleep shirt, and open the door groggily as if he’s been woken from a deep and _very_ unaffected slumber. He’ll say, “oh, it’s you,” as if he was expecting someone else, or no one at all, and has _certainly_ not been sitting in the armchair by the door for eight and a half days straight wondering when you’d show up and drinking mug after mug of mediocre tea because he’s been too afraid to go to the market in case you show up while he’s gone.

But these are fantasies. He knows they are fantasies, because after the longest twenty seconds of his life, he walks straight towards the door and opens it with all the enthusiasm of a golden retriever.

Sirius is standing there, and _buggering basilisks_ he looks like he could have stood there for three days more, all casual and unbothered and leaning against the door jamb smoking a cigarette as if he’d dropped by to ask for a cup of sugar and a quick shag, while you’re at it.

“Afternoon,” Sirius says as a greeting, bringing himself back up to his full height and crushing the cigarette underneath the toe of his filthy boot.

(It is, in fact, half ten and pitch black.)

“You look…” Remus begins, but there is no compliment to be given so he doesn’t finish the sentence. “Come in.”

Sirius steps over the threshold as if it is a portal to another world.

“Place looks the same.”

It doesn’t, actually. It’s been painted and there’s still a gaping hole in the drywall from where they’d installed a Muggle contraption to help his mum get up the stairs. An entire wall is gone, the one opposite the kitchen sink that used to house the cabinets filled with Hope’s various cooking supplies. (The wall had come down when it finally got too dangerous for her to be unsupervised near the stove.)

But Remus imagines Sirius doesn’t remember ever being here at all, is just digging up platitudes from a file titled “Things Normal People Say” deep in his brain, so he doesn’t point any of this out.

It’s been a long while since Remus has had company in this slowly crumbling cottage – years, in fact – and as much as it is now his, it doesn’t feel like home. The last home he’d truly had was the one he shared with Sirius, fifteen years ago in a place that might as well have been another planet but was actually just London. But Sirius had bought that place for them, and the bank had reclaimed it when he…

“I’ll make tea,” Remus says.

It is not actually possible for tea to be the cure for everything. It is, for all intents and purposes, leaf-flavored water. But Remus needs something to do with his hands other than stuff them into his pockets while he rocks back and forth on his heels, so he heads towards the kitchen like he’s just heard the starter’s pistol of an Olympic race.

Sirius begins pacing the small sitting room, running his eyes over the walls as if there is art on them. (There is not. Suddenly, Remus very much wishes there were.) Remus tries very hard not to watch his every movement, the way he shakes constantly with small, nervous tremors, the way his eyes flit nervously around the room and his fingers fiddle with something only he can feel. There are any number of adjectives Remus would use to describe the man in his sitting room, not one of which he ever would have associated with Sirius: awkward, uncertain, self-conscious, old.

The sink is still leaking and the stove is old and barely functional. The kettle is still filled but the water has grown warm, so Remus places it back on the stove and prepares two mugs, annoyed at how little time that actually kills, and turns to rest against the counter while he waits for the water to boil.

He yawns. He feels rather old, too.

“Sorry the place is so…” Remus begins, but trails off once he realizes that Sirius had been living in a jail cell for twelve years, and then Merlin-only-knows-where for the year after that, and probably does not mind that the drywall is cracking and the floors are beginning to slant.

Sirius does not turn to look at him, might not even have heard him at all, and is instead staring into the vacant fireplace as if, at the very least, it currently holds a fire. Remus takes a moment to study him, properly this time. His hair is as long as it’s ever been but lacks any trace of its old luster. His skin, which used to be a deep, tanned olive now looks merely sallow and sick. He was never particularly muscular, but now he looks as if the only thing keeping him upright is sheer force of will. The ragged clothes he’s managed to scrounge up hang off him and every visible bone protrudes so fully it looks as if it might poke right through his skin. He is the same man – Remus can see that clearly, now – but it is as if every feature that used to make him look beautiful and elegant now makes him look sharp and severe.

(Remus still thinks he is beautiful. And he never was very invested in elegance.)

“We could light a fi–”

“This is how I spoke to Har–”

They both begin to speak at the same time, and both stop just as quickly, all too willing to yield space and speech to each other. Remus clears his throat and gestures for Sirius to continue, but Sirius isn’t paying attention, hasn’t moved his gaze from the sooty chamber of the fireplace. Remus crosses his arms and allows silence to fill the room again, silence being something he has always been comfortable with and Sirius being someone who looks like he’ll never be comfortable again.

Eventually, the kettle squeals again and he pours the water over the pathetic little store-brand tea bags before offering a mug to Sirius.

Sirius takes it with shaking hands, as unsure and apprehensive as if this is the first time anyone has ever offered him anything, and that breaks Remus’s heart right in two. He wishes he could give Sirius so much more.

And, if he’s honest, a part of him resents the way Sirius looks so small and needy and deserving of sympathy.

Remus gestures for Sirius to take a seat on the tattered sofa that occupies too much of the sitting room, and then takes his own seat on the opposite end. It’s odd, sharing a piece of furniture with someone he used to share a bed with and yet mindfully trying to stay as far away from him as possible.

Sirius sips his tea.

“S’good.”

It’s not.

“I’m glad.”

He doesn’t mean it.

How, exactly, are they supposed to do this?

* * *

The next day, Remus wakes to the sound of chickens. It is quaint and charming and even romantic, until he realizes that he does not own chickens.

He dresses quickly and heads downstairs, past the rumpled blankets on the sofa where Sirius had (maybe?) slept and out to the backyard, where he soon spots an energetic Padfoot chasing birds around the lawn. They are not in fact chickens, they are mostly ducks, and they squawk angrily with Padfoot on their tails until they gain enough height to escape the shaggy black dog and head for the sanctuary of the pond a kilometer or so off.

Remus smiles in spite of himself, wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes as if smiling is a thing he does often. This is a version of Sirius he knows what to do with, reckless and playful, some might even say cruel. (And some would be right, he supposes, no one knowing this better than Remus himself.) Padfoot spots him, and shakes the morning dew off his fur before prancing up to Remus and sitting directly in front of him, ever obedient to his master.

“Breakfast?” Remus asks the dog.

Sirius just walks past Remus into the cottage kitchen and transforms back into man.

This is a bit more awkward.

Remus begins rifling through the refrigerator for whatever he can find there and Sirius stands in the kitchen, all gawky and half-present and uncertain again. Remus is not an Animagus, has never really understood the process or what it feels like to transform into one’s animal form, but he is unsettled by the way one version of Sirius can be happy and playful and scaring the living shite out of a flock of ducks, and the other can be so guarded and unsure and standing _so fucking close_ to Remus as if he’s never seen a kitchen before.

(Remus feels properly guilty at the thought. It has probably, actually, been _years_ since Sirius has seen a kitchen.)

Here’s the thing: They have _a lot_ to talk about. Remus still isn’t sure what all occurred with Harry and the tournament, just received an obnoxiously ambiguous letter from Dumbledore telling him to expect Sirius (as if _that’s_ all fine and good, anyway). It was too dangerous to risk owling Sirius while he was in hiding, which means the last time they’d had any contact at all, Remus was morphing into a murderous beast and Sirius was trying to keep him in his right mind.

Full circle, and whatnot.

There is no proper place to begin, so Remus scrounges up a few eggs and some flour and they begin with pancakes.

They are tucking into their breakfast with an unusual amount of English politeness when an owl taps its beak on the window above the sink. When Remus opens the window wide enough to take the letter from the owl’s beak and give it a bit of leftover pancake, he immediately recognizes the official red seal and prim, slanted writing.

“It’s from Dumbledore,” He says, opening the letter with his thumb.

Sirius makes a noncommittal sound and pushes food around his plate with a fork.

Remus reads the letter through three times, his forehead creasing a bit more into a look of ambiguous confusion with each reading, and then places it on the table next to a glass of orange juice and picks up his own fork.

“What’s he want?” Sirius asks, but sounds rather uninterested in the answer.

“Just Order business,” Remus replies.

“Mmm,” Sirius says, stabbing a piece of pancake much harder than absolutely necessary. “Guess I’m not important enough to be kept apprised of the goings-on.”

So this is how it’s going to be, then.

“You’re welcome to read it, Sirius.” Remus replies flatly, and even moves the letter so it’s right next to Sirius’s plate.

Sirius does not read it. Sirius does not want to read it. He wants to be angry and sulky and feel left out and wronged, because there are far too many feelings overwhelming him at any given moment and he needs very much to find a place to put them.

They eat the remainder of their breakfast in silence and Sirius does the washing up. All in all, it kills exactly thirty-seven minutes (not that either of them are counting). Then Remus excuses himself to the library that used to be his childhood bedroom under the guise of “having a few things to finish up.” (Which is… _kind of_ true. He has things to finish up, and those things are getting away from Sirius.) Sirius spends much of the day as Padfoot, wandering around the large yard and terrorizing some more of creation.

It is early evening by the time Remus emerges from his study, and the sun is just beginning to drop lower into the sky, casting the cottage in a sleepy, orange light. It makes him feel nostalgic for evenings spent in the Gryffindor common room, planning pranks and pretending to do homework before they headed down to the Great Hall for supper.

He puts the kettle on for tea and stares out the kitchen window while he waits for it to boil. There is a terrifying amount of mundanity to the whole situation, he and Sirius living together again as if the past fourteen years had never happened, and it sets Remus on edge. He has grown accustomed to being alone, living alone, eating alone. He never stopped to consider building a life with anyone but Sirius, and even then, his visions were naive and unrealistic. How much time had he spent wishing things would just go back to the way they were, wishing Sirius were around again to join him in the terribly domestic aspects of everyday life?

What is it, they say, about being careful what you wish for?

* * *

Three days pass in more or less exactly the same manner. Neither of them had intended to go so long without addressing the giant, polka dotted, fourteen-year-old elephant in the room, but as each day passes, the elephant becomes more and more present and less and less easy to talk about. Remus finally makes it to the market, so they drink better tea and smoke too many cigarettes, but otherwise things seem to be getting worse. There is, somehow, _nothing_ to talk about, not until they can talk about The Big Thing, so they mostly come together only for meals and, even then, they each have the courtesy to bring along a book to pretend to read.

But on day four, Remus starts to feel the moon.

It is a few days off still, and normally he really only begins to feel it on the single day leading up to a full. But since Snape stopped brewing the Wolfsbane potion for him (and, because he’s a bit more…on edge, than usual), the moon affects him like never before, and his patience is about as thin as a single sheaf of parchment.

Sirius still smells the same. Biochemically, he has not changed, so Remus’s head swims with all kinds of confusing messages from _fuck him_ to _punch him_ to _lay your head on his lap_. When he is not Padfoot, Sirius paces the cottage slowly and anxiously. It is starting to wear on Remus, whose under eyes are becoming purpled from his restless nights of fitful sleep.

And then, Sirius brings up The Bookcase.

Back when they first moved in together, fresh out of Hogwarts and madly, sickeningly in love, Sirius bought Remus a bookcase. It was nice, solid oak and sturdy construction, large enough to hold a good portion of Remus’s gigantic literary collection. Sirius had recruited James and Peter to help him pick it up from a Muggle furniture store, and then Sirius had spelled it up the staircase and into their sitting room where he presented it with a flourish and a singsonged “ta-da!”.

But Remus refused to put his books on the bloody thing.

At first, Sirius thought he was just being bashful. Then, he thought maybe Remus just hadn’t gotten around to it. But eventually, he became genuinely irritated.

 _“It’s a SHELF, Remus. Not an engagement ring,”_ Sirius had said, when Remus finally admitted he just wasn’t quite comfortable with the whole gift thing.

Truth was, Remus would have _preferred_ an engagement ring, then at least he’d have some proof that Sirius was planning on sticking around. But as it was, they were eighteen, and flighty, and Sirius had constantly wandering eyes for anything that swayed its hips when it walked, and Remus was flat broke. Which is what it ultimately came down to. He’d reluctantly agreed to move in with Sirius only when Sirius promised to let him pay some portion of the rent (which, realistically, he couldn’t scrounge up most of the time anyway), but he drew the line at being bought gifts, even rather inexpensive, thoughtful ones.

It was really rather stupid. But the more Sirius became exasperated, the more Remus dug his heels in, until one day it all came to blows.

 _“Oh for fuck’s sake, Remus!”_ Sirius had shouted. _“If I wanted someone to just buy things for, I’d have gone down to Soho and found myself a call boy!”_

Surprisingly, this was not the right thing to say. Remus fumed, began to yell, turned instead to pouting, and the whole thing ended with Sirius hexing the shelf into oblivion. It was minor, overall, but it was one of few fights of theirs that never quite managed to become a joke, never made it past hurt-feelings territory and into we-can-laugh-about-it-now territory. 

So on day four, Remus is sitting in the old, cushy armchair in his study when Sirius wanders in and notices the books, all stacked up on the floor and not tucked away categorically onto shelves.

“Still not using bookcases, I see,” Sirius says, eyeing one particularly tall stack. 

Sirius could not even remember what a pot roast looked like, so he did not know why he’d retained this one, particular memory. Probably because it was not an especially happy one, and thus one the Dementors were uninterested in. Either way it is, once again, not the right thing to say.

Remus immediately tenses, feels the harsh pull of the moon and the stuffy air of the library and _loses_ it, as only Remus Lupin can: by closing his book and removing his reading glasses and walking purposely and calmly into the kitchen, where he pours himself _half a mug’s worth_ of whiskey and downs it all in one long, burning gulp. He follows it up with a biscuit and a cup of Earl Grey, and then sits down determinedly at the kitchen table, where he steeples his hands in front of him, looks at Sirius, and says:

“So, shall we talk about Harry, then?”

Sirius concedes, sits down across from Remus at the table, and says, “I guess we should.”

“What the bloody hell happened?” Remus asks.

“Dumbledore didn’t tell you?” Sirius responds.

“Not in very much detail.”

In no detail, in fact. The letter he’d received twelve days ago from Dumbledore was mostly a particularly pandering collection of truly Dumbledore-esque platitudes that said things like, “Some ghosts like to take up residence in our hearts, until all we can do is open the attic door,” or some such rubbish that means essentially nothing and sounds particularly patronizing, in the process. It had ended with a statement, not an ask, that Sirius was going to be coming to stay with him more or less indefinitely, and he was to keep Sirius from running off and exposing himself and getting himself locked back up in Azkaban.

They’re both just supposed to…roll with that, apparently.

“He’s back,” Is all Sirius says as an explanation for _fucking everything_.

“I’d figured as much.”

“You just said you didn’t know anything.”

“I didn’t, I said…” It doesn’t matter what he said. Already, he knows this is not going well. Luckily, the buzz of the whiskey is starting to seep into Remus’s mind and muscles and they loosen under the promises of lowered inhibitions and suppressed anxieties.

“Well, he’s back. Killed some boy, nearly killed _Harry_ in the process,” Sirius says, and makes it sound just a _little too much_ like it’s something Remus had any control over.

Remus gestures vaguely when he realizes Sirius isn’t actually intending on telling him anything more and says, “And?”

“And _what_ , Remus?” Sirius says, as if he’s the one frustrated with this conversation, and begins fiddling with a paper serviette that’s been left out on the table. “Voldemort is fully human again, Harry nearly died, I might as well still be a prisoner, and _you_ …”

Remus gives him a warning look, a _don’t go there unless you want to go there_ kind of look that furrows his brows and draws his lips into a thin line.

“But how, exactly, did he manage to become human again, Sirius?”

Sirius launches into a decidedly undetailed recap of the events in the cemetery, of the third task and the Portkey and Cedric and the summoning of the Death Eaters, before he gets into the details of the ritual itself. All the while he makes precisely zero eye contact with Remus, and has now torn the serviette into a hundred little pieces of white confetti.

“And then Peter–”

“ _Peter_ was there?”

“Yes, Remus,” Sirius says, as if this is very obvious. “Peter was there. Peter is a Death Eater, remember?”

“I bloody,” The whiskey isn’t slurring his words yet, but it is making him more short-tempered than usual. Or maybe that’s the moon. Or Sirius. He places his palms firmly on the tabletop to steady himself and try to quell some of the rising anger. “I _know_ who Peter is, Sirius, you just hadn’t _mentioned_ –”

“Mentioned _what_ , Remus??”

They’re both saying each other’s names an awful lot, and it’s odd. Odd because they never much used each other’s proper names back when they were younger, and odd because neither of them have spoken each other’s name in a very long time, and odd because neither of them really thought they ever would again. It is as if by speaking their names into the room, it will ground them back in the reality that they are here, together, that it is not a dream or an illusion, and then maybe they will remember that they used to love each other.

Remus takes a deep breath, always the one to take a deep breath. Sirius keeps breathing ragged and rapid and lets it raise his pulse and his blood pressure and the tension in the room and it’s _always_ been that way, so Remus takes another deep breath.

“So what did Peter do, Sirius?”

“Cut off his bloody hand, ‘swat he did.” Sirius reaches for the lighter and pack of cigarettes they’ve been going through like candy, taps a cigarette out, and puts it between his lips before lighting it, right there at the table. Remus would tell him to take it outside, but he’s a bit shocked by the hand comment, (and also he’d never actually tell Sirius to take it outside.)

“He has a fetish for cutting off appendages,” Remus says, more to himself than to Sirius, and, sod it, reaches for his own cigarette.

Sirius pauses mid-puff and trains Remus with an incredulous look.

“It was part of the ritual.”

“I _figured_ as much, Sirius, I just…”

He just what? He just thinks it’s funny. It’s fucking hilarious, actually. He’d laugh, if the ritual hadn’t gone and brought Voldemort back to life to nearly kill Harry and destroy all their lives again and bring _Sirius_ here to his _house_ which he doesn’t even really _like_ to smoke a cigarette between lips that look _the absolute same_.

“So what took you so long?” Is the next question Remus can think to ask.

“What?”

“Dumbledore owled to say you were coming eight days before you actually got here.”

Sirius drapes his arm over the back of his chair and lets the ash of his cigarette fall slowly onto his ill-fitting trousers.

“Oh _sorry_ , Remus, I’d have gone and chartered an airplane but I’m fresh out of Muggle money and see, you can’t _apparate_ without a _wand–_ ”

The cigarette smoke hits Remus’s stomach, mixes with too much whiskey and too little food, and curdles into something hard and heavy. Sirius is being impossible, and Remus can’t even really blame him, but he also can’t sit here any longer and talk circles around what the actual problem is, not with bile rising in his throat and the moon seeping into his joints and Sirius being…

“I can’t _talk to you_ when you’re _like this!”_ Remus spits, bracing his hands once again on the table, this time to stop the room from spinning.

What he expects Sirius to say is more or less some version of, “You don’t much talk to me when I’m not like this, either.” What Sirius actually says is:

“Then why are we still talking?”

Remus looks up at him slowly, too quick and the world will go topsy-turvy, and when he finally meets Sirius’s eyes they glare back at him with sincerity and desperation and something that sparks a great many memories in Remus’s subconscious.

“Sirius,” He says pleadingly, though he’s not sure what he’s pleading for.

“I mean it, Remus,” Sirius replies, and he sounds more confident than he has in days. “Let’s stop bloody _talking_ and just–”

But suddenly, the kitchen table is on its side and the sounds of their breakfast dishes shattering against the floor startles Sirius out of his seat. Before he can react, Remus has leapt out of his own chair and pinned Sirius to the wall and is kissing him so bruisingly hard it is actually painful. Their bodies are pressed so close together that they stumble a bit over each other’s feet, and all there is is heat. The heat of their tongues, as they explore each other’s mouths like rediscovered caves, and the heat of Remus’s hands gripping Sirius’s hips to hold him still, and the heat radiating off their rapidly hardening cocks and seeking each other out through cloth and denim as if that is, truly, all that’s keeping them apart.

Remus didn’t mean to…he didn’t mean to do _this_ , especially not _like this_ , so he pulls his lips away from Sirius’s and takes a step back, loosening his grip on Sirius’s hips but keeping his hands there all the same.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t…” _ask, know if you wanted this, know if you ever even wanted me to touch you again…_ “Sirius, can I–”

“Yes,” Sirius responds, breathlessly. “Fuck, Remus, yes. You can do whatever you want.”

This isn’t true. He can’t do _whatever_ he wants. But he can kiss Sirius again, so he does, and he finds that Sirius tastes exactly the same.

Sirius doesn’t quite remember how to use any of his body anymore, but he brings his hands to either side of Remus’s face and holds it there, so their mouths will stay attached. Their kisses are deep, so deep that they can practically run their tongues over each other’s palates, and it reminds Sirius of being a teenager again, before they knew that they could kiss without swallowing each other whole and it would still be just as fun.

For now, though, they _want_ to swallow each other whole. They are so very far apart, practically on different dimensional planes, and maybe if they can just absorb into each other it will bridge the divide.

There is also the fact that Sirius hasn’t fucked in a decade and a half, and may come in his pants from this alone.

Remus – who has, for his part, fucked a great many times in the past decade and a half – has been hard in his trousers since the first touch of Sirius’s lips on his, and begins to grind into Sirius’s leg, and there is a groan between their intertwined tongues that may have come from either one of them.

“I – _fuck_ , Sirius – can I take off your shirt?”

Sirius doesn’t respond verbally, just begins unbuttoning with shaky fingers the thing that is in fact _Remus’s_ shirt. With the first glimpse of exposed skin, Remus’s hands are there, gliding over warmth and too-visible bone. The nerves of his hands hold memories and they recognize their old companion so quickly, Remus is pulling little moans and whimpers out of Sirius without any effort at all. When all the buttons are undone, Remus pushes the shirt off Sirius’s arms and then attaches his lips the arch of Sirius’s shoulder, over the protruding line of his collarbone, to the spot above his pulse point where Remus latches, nipping at the skin there and sucking little marks into the shadow behind his ear. Sirius turns his head, exposing his neck and inviting _more_ and Remus happily obliges.

The amount of sensation overwhelms Sirius, the only thing he’s touched recently being a great big bird, and part of him wants to close off entirely. He worries, though, that if he does, Remus will never touch him again and _no one_ will ever touch him again so instead he lets the sensation overwhelm him, closing his eyes against the stars starting to bloom behind them.

“ _Moony_ ,” He gasps, as Remus suddenly brings his hand to grasp Sirius through the corduroy pants that are, also, Remus’s. He wraps his nearly claw-like fingers around Remus’s forearms, asking for less and begging for more all at once.

“What do you want, Sirius?” Remus whispers, and it ghosts over Sirius’s ear and causes the hair on the back of his neck to prickle.

Sirius closes his eyes, shakes his head, not a “no” but an “I don’t know”.

_I don’t know how to ask for the things I want. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how to want._

“Can I touch you?” Remus asks, his fingers are stroking Sirius’s chin now and it’s every ounce of tenderness he’s not been able to show over the past four days.

Sirius nods voraciously, his eyes still shut tight, and Remus wonders when exactly he got _so damn quiet_ but does not question him, just begins unzipping his trousers and dips his free hand under the waistline of Sirius’s briefs.

“ _Oh_ ,” Sirius squeaks when the skin of Remus’s hand touches the skin of his cock, finally and again.

Remus just holds Sirius’s erection in his hand for a moment, pausing long enough to close his own eyes and absorb the feeling. Sirius is not fully hard, hasn’t been for… _years_ , but Remus can still feel the blood pulse through the hot, velvety skin and he tightens his grip a bit, just so he can feel it more thoroughly. He wants to drop to his knees right there and take Sirius into his mouth, but Sirius is already thrusting gently into his hand.

“That’s it, fuck my hand, Sirius,” Remus coaxes.

With permission, Sirius does. He jerks into Remus’s grip while Remus brings one hand down to the flesh of Sirius’s arse, pulling him closer so that Sirius can feel the hard ridge of Remus’s own cock against his leg.

There is no acknowledgement that this is happening. _What_ is happening. Remus wants to say “I missed this” and Sirius wants to say “please don’t let me go”, but Remus is too stubborn and Sirius is too laid bare as it is. Remus rests his forehead against Sirius’s, slouching a little to make up for Remus’s extra few inches, but it’s fine because Sirius is arching his back off the wall and into Remus’s hand, over and over.

Sirius comes with a loud gasp and without warning, Remus stroking him through it while warm, watery spunk coats his fingers. They are breathing into each other’s mouths, sharing the same air between them. Sirius goes limp in Remus’s grip, but Remus holds him against the wall with deceptively strong arms and kisses him gently.

And then, Remus lets him go. And he slides down the wall a little, but catches himself on his own shaky legs and then just stands there, staring at Remus while Remus stares back, panting and flushed and still, nothing to say.

They stare and stare, actually taking each other in for the first time. Then Sirius turns and heads up the stairs, towards the bathroom to clean himself up and hide from what’s just happened. Remus runs his fingers through his hair and scrubs them over his eyes before he walks to the kitchen and turns on the faucet and splashes freezing cold water onto his face.

The sink drips mockingly even after he turns it off, reminding him that he hasn’t, in fact, fixed anything at all.

* * *

Remus dreams about the shack. He and Sirius are trading banter and brief apologies – _“Not at all, Padfoot, old friend…and will you, in turn, forgive me for believing you were the spy?”_ – and then the floor drops out and they hang from four tidy strings each, marionettes with round pink cheeks, and the puppeteer dips them both into practiced little bows and the audience applauds. It’s been a good show; convincing. The audience has bought into it, and then they look at each other, and _they_ have bought into it too, for a moment. But they are merely acting in a show written by someone else entirely. They are good enough actors to believe each other’s performances, but then their strings are severed and they have to face each other again, no master to dub their neat little apologies or manipulate them into gentle little movements, and their pink cheeks disappear into their skin and the smiles fade from their faces. The audience is still convinced, but they are not, they remember, and they recite eerie, even chants at each other, _I don’t forgive you, I don’t forgive you, I don’t forgive you_ …

He jolts awake.

The room is still dark but he can’t feel the moon anymore, so it must be dusk. He is coated in an uncomfortable layer of cold sweat, and he is hard in his pants. He has been, really, since yesterday, when he felt too confused and wrong and guilty to get himself off. The full moon is even closer now, though, and he is aching and restless, so he gives in and reaches under the band of his boxers and finally grips himself.

He bites back a moan, the sheer pleasure of relief loosening his muscles a bit, and strokes himself slowly while he thinks of Sirius’s cock, Sirius’s mouth, Sirius’s cum all over his hands. He hears Sirius’s labored moans and desperate little whimpers and it sparks memories and fantasies he hasn’t allowed himself to visit in a very long time. Sirius moaning. Sirius desperate. Sirius begging and pleading and crying and coming and–

His climax surprises him with its intensity and he covers his mouth with the back of his hand to muffle the sound of a whimper that might be Sirius’s name.

He’s not hard anymore, but his bones still ache, and he’s still overwhelming frustrated, with Sirius and the situation and mostly with himself. The room is too hot for him to get back to sleep, so he throws on a pair of joggers and heads downstairs for a cigarette, sneaking past Sirius’s sleeping form on the sofa on the way to the small, rotting porch that overlooks the yard. The first drag calms him and he closes his eyes, remembering the way he and James used to sneak cigarettes out of the castle and smoke them by the Black Lake, Remus chastising James for the nasty habit all the while lighting cigarette after cigarette of his own.

“Ought to think about quitting, don’t you think?”

Remus startles, realizing he’s had his eyes closed for longer than he intended. Sirius has appeared beside him, his hair mussed from sleep, and he’s leaning over the porch railing next to Remus. He looks younger, in the gentle light of dusk, his face appears less harsh and the sharp angles of his body are softer.

“You’re getting too old for such awful habits,” Sirius teases, nudging Remus playfully with his elbow as he reaches for the carton to extract a cigarette of his own.

Remus lets out a small chuckle, and nudges right back. “You’re one to talk.”

For several moments, they stand just like that, taking slow drags through morning-grimy teeth. Perhaps something has loosened since their encounter the day prior, or perhaps they just fit better in the liminal space between night and day, but something feels easier in this moment. They stand next to each other like old friends, reunited after several years apart. Perhaps they have finally realized that, even with everything else being what it is, they _are_ old friends, reunited after several years apart.

“Do you remember,” Sirius finally says, tapping some of the ash from the end of his cigarette, “that summer we spent at James’s?”

Remus looks at Sirius, expecting to see pain or confusion or that Sirius is not in fact there at all, that he is merely still dreaming. But Sirius just looks pensive, the yellow glow of the early day outlining the features of his profile as if they are a part of the sunrise itself.

Remus looks away from Sirius again, back over the hills that extend beyond the reaches of the fence line, and nods.

“Do you remember when his parents caught us toking up by the pool?” Sirius asks, his lips quirking into the smallest of smiles. “And we managed to convince them that we were practicing wandless smoke spells?”

Remus’s own laugh catches him off guard. He _hadn’t_ remembered, intentionally avoids remembering many things from that time in his life outside of small, measured doses, like he has been vaccinating himself for fifteen years against the memories of James Potter.

“What on earth made you think of that?” Remus asks, awed at the things Sirius’s Dementor-addled mind has managed to retain.

Sirius shrugs and stares at his fingers. “Dunno,” He says.

Remus allows the memory to fill his conscious for a moment. Not the whole summer – the first one Sirius spent with the Potters after he ran away – but that day, by the pool, trading jokes and ideas and dreams about who they wanted to be. He remembers with an aching fondness the look on Mrs. Potter’s face when she’d come outside to bring lemonade and sandwiches and found them trading a poorly-rolled joint back and forth, the way she had thrown a little wink over her shoulder at them as she walked back inside.

“You look just the same,” Sirius says under his breath, but they are standing so close and the morning is so quiet that Remus hears him perfectly.

“I look like death walking, Sirius,” Remus responds, self-deprecating as ever, though he’s still smiling.

Sirius doesn’t smile though, just turns his unshaved face towards Remus and looks at him earnestly. “You look just the same,” He says again. “The prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Sirius turns from him again, stamps out the butt of his cigarette and reaches for another. Remus stares at him, waiting for him to give some indication that he is joking or mocking or not even here at all, but he doesn’t. He just puts the new cigarette between his lips and cups his hand around the end while he lights it, no different than if he’d said nothing at all.

Several times, Remus opens his mouth to respond, but there is nothing to say that can express what he wants to. The ache in his bones feels shallower now, but a new kind of ache has sprung up somewhere in the region of his chest.

They watch the sun rise over the grassy hills until it has fully emerged. They don’t move but a few inches, the only sounds they make those of small, comfortable, even breaths. The silence has lulled Remus into complacency, so Sirius catches him even further off guard when he speaks again.

“Why didn’t you question it, Remus?” Sirius asks. There is no malice in his voice, no accusation, just gentle curiosity.

Remus turns his head towards Sirius sharply. “I…”

“You knew me better than anyone,” Sirius continues, “better than James, even.”

Remus opens his mouth to protest, because _no one_ knew Sirius better than James, but Sirius continues.

“No, Remus, you did. You knew all parts of me. James and I were like brothers but you were…you were a _part_ of me.”

Remus shuts his eyes and hangs his head, all the meanings of Sirius’s words overcoming him. _You were a part of me. I was a part of you. You felt what I felt. But you didn’t feel this._

“Sirius…”

“I _never_ would have…you should have known that I never would have–”

“I did know.” The words are out of Remus’s mouth before he can stop them, so he steels himself and summons his Gryffindor courage and opens his eyes and looks right at Sirius, right into his eyes. “At first, I knew. I knew the second I found out that it couldn’t have been you, that I must have been missing something and there was something you hadn’t told me, or–”

“Or someone else had done it.” Sirius reaches for a third cigarette. Remus can hardly blame him.

“You hadn’t told me, Sirius,” Remus says, voice small but steady. “You hadn’t told me that you’d switched…that Peter…after a while, I figured there couldn’t be any other explanation.”

“Didn’t it hurt, at all?” Sirius’s sounds matter-of-fact, so very _un_ -Sirius like, all business and no feeling. “Thinking I’d done it…Didn’t it hurt too much?”

Remus stares at him, disbelieving.

“Of _course_ it hurt, Sirius,” He says, pleading and confused. “It hurt more than anything ever had…how can you _ask_ me that?”

Sirius shrugs, nonchalant, negotiative. “You didn’t try to find me.”

Remus feels like he is lightyears behind this conversation. The cigarette must have made him lightheaded, because he knows Sirius is speaking but he doesn’t understand what he is saying.

“You thought Peter came and found me,” Sirius continues. “You thought he came and found me and we dueled and I killed him.”

Remus nods. _Yes, that is what I thought_. He still doesn’t understand.

“But _you_ didn’t try to find me.”

Oh.

 _Oh_.

There it is. Sirius could accept what Remus made of the overwhelming evidence, that Remus eventually came to hate him for what he thought Sirius had done, hate him viciously, passionately. But Sirius could not accept that Remus did not come for him, did not seek him out, even believing he’d done such a terrible thing. Not that Remus didn’t try to find him and hold him and ask him what had really happened, but that Remus didn’t try to find him when he thought Sirius had betrayed their closest friends; _hate_ him, but find him, keep him safe, keep their promises to each other. They were supposed to be there for each other in good times and bad, and Remus had broken his promise. He’d abandoned Sirius to the bad.

“ _Sirius_.”

It’s all Remus can say. There is nothing he can give Sirius that will make it better. Sirius knows Remus is not _that kind_ of loyal, the kind that overlooks everything dark and cruel and turns away, pretends like he does not see it. He would have died for his friends in a heartbeat, but he’d have turned away from them even quicker if he ever actually thought that they had switched sides. But Sirius has spent twelve years having everything good sucked out of him, wasting away, and there is no nuance for him. There is only dark and light, good and bad, there and not there, here and not here.

“You didn’t try to find me,” Sirius says again, but slower, sadder, as if the reality of it has just now sunk in.

“I…” Remus begins, but no. He cannot say _I couldn’t_ , or _I didn’t want to_ , or _please try to understand_. Because as much as it hasn’t always felt like it, he, at least, has been _free_. So he just does the only thing he can think to do, and says something that is true. “I didn’t. I didn’t try to find you. And I have regretted that every day since.”

Something happens, when the story of the thing that clings to your insides is told, honestly, revealed for what it is. It loses some of its power. It is all _so much more_ complicated than this, it is a full spectrum of gray between the black and white, but here is what is true: They loved each other more than life, and when that broke – when they let it break – it created something that can only ever be regretted.

Sirius looks so much softer now, than he did in the Shack or when he showed up at Remus’s doorstep or even five minutes ago, and it unclenches something inside Remus too. But underneath it all, Sirius just looks sad. Just tired and absent and beaten down and Remus has to touch him, so he brings his hand to Sirius’s lower back. Sirius looks at him, eyes searching his face for something secure to hold onto.

“ _Darling_ ,” Remus says. He doesn’t know how he didn’t see it earlier, how lost Sirius is, lashing out like a cornered feral dog, unsure what to do with tenderness.

Sirius shakes his head. “I don’t know how to do this, Moony. I don’t know how to… _be_.”

Remus brings him into his arms, an embrace so full he can fit his own hands together behind Sirius’s emaciated middle. Sirius may or may not be crying, but he is definitely shaking, so Remus steels himself into an unmoving presence, a hardened mountain that Sirius can cling to. 

“I’m sorry, Sirius. I’m so, so sorry.” Remus repeats it over and over, not saying _it’s okay_ , because it’s not, and not cooing soothing little _shhhh_ ’s into Sirius’s hair, because Sirius does not need to be quiet, can in fact be as loud as he wants, if that’s what he needs.

Remus rubs slowly over Sirius’s back with one hand and brings the other to hold the back of Sirius’s head steady against his chest. For the moment, every ounce of anger and resentment, every ounce of _you suspected me too,_ has leeched out of him, and all he wants is Sirius to be okay. He’s desperate with the need to make it better.

“Sirius…” He whispers into Sirius’s hair, but it’s not the right name anymore. “ _Padfoot_. What do you need? How can I…I want to make it better, Pads. Tell me. Tell me what I can do.”

Sirius shakes his head, lost, unfamiliar with even the _idea_ of “better”. He is small, adrift and unmoored, wandering anxiously and awkwardly through life and Remus’s cottage because he has no anchor to cling to, to wander from knowing it will pull him back.

“How can I…”

Suddenly, Remus knows. He knows exactly – well, maybe – how to create an anchor.

He leans back from Sirius just enough to look him in the eye, searches them for some hint that he is right, that his instincts have made it through fourteen years of distance. Very slowly, he brings his hand to cup Sirius’s jaw and, meeting no resistance, firmly tilts it so Sirius is looking directly at him, mere inches away. When his eyes meet Remus’s, they flash with a spark of recognition.

“Padfoot,” Remus says gently, “Do you want to…” He clears his throat. He doesn’t usually have a problem asking for what he wants, not anymore, but he’s also never been so afraid that the person he’s asking will say “no”, will turn him down and he’ll be stuck helpless again, unable to do anything to make it _better_. He tries again. “I want to make you mine again, Sirius. Do you want that? Can I do that for you?”

For a dreadful moment, Sirius doesn’t respond at all, just stares and stares into Remus’s eyes. But then, he nods, slowly, and the look of relief that crosses his face makes Remus certain that he means it.

“Okay,” Remus says. “Okay. Go upstairs, to the bedroom. Kneel on the floor and wait for me. I’ll be right there. Okay?”

Sirius nods again, and then immediately turns and walks back into the house.

Back when they were younger, when this was strictly _fun_ , Remus would ask Sirius to do this exact thing, to kneel and wait for him. He got off on the idea that Sirius was just there, uncharacteristically patient just because Remus told him to be, and Sirius got off on the waiting, the not knowing if it would be minutes or hours before Remus finally showed up.

But today, Remus just needs a moment to breath, collect himself. He is so tired. He hasn’t slept much, but he’s also never smoked so much, so he feels short of breath, and the full moon is coming, and he is tired. It’s the kind of fatigue that seeps into your bones and weighs them down. And yet the full moon itself could not keep him from Sirius right now. He downs a glass of water and climbs the stairs, and the anticipation that prickles up his spine is familiar but it is also entirely new. This is uncharted territory, delicate as anything, so when he reaches the landing, he pauses just outside the door, just like he did in the Shack. Only now, it is just them, just raw truth and exposed feelings. Remus hopes more than he has ever hoped for anything that he still knows how to be just what Sirius needs.

* * *

Remus didn’t tell Sirius to undress, but he has. Sirius is an overachiever, a perfectionist, the product of parents who were never going to be satisfied with anything he did.

But right now, Remus wishes he wasn’t. Because he has not seen Sirius naked yet, not completely, and the sight freezes him to the spot on the floor just inside the bedroom. For as much as Sirius looks different, entirely different, he also looks so very similar. Remus takes one look at his lover, in the same position he assumed so many times in the past, and it bridges the chasm, brings a bit more of the _then_ into the _now_ , and it flips a switch inside his body.

Falling quickly back into a familiar headspace, he slowly walks closer to Sirius, circling his waiting body once, twice.

Sirius doesn’t dare look up, keeps his eyes trained on the woodgrain of the bedroom floor. The hair on his neck begins to prickle as he feels Remus’s eyes take in every inch of his naked body, sizing him up and beginning to dissect through his very skin. He has gotten so used to being exposed, but it has been so very, terribly long since he has been _seen_.

Remus takes in the black marks of crude tattoos, and marred tissue of scars bearing unknowable kinds of pain, and skin clinging so closely to prominent bones without fat or muscle to stand between them. Sirius has his hands clasped in front of him, his neck bent, and Remus notices all the strands of silvery white that stand out against the jet black of his unruly hair.

“Look at me,” Remus commands.

Sirius immediately trains his eyes on his lover’s face. They meet – stark grey against honey brown – and everything that has not, cannot be said between them is there, in the meeting of eyes and the spark of magic between them and the way heat curls into the pits of both of their stomachs.

“Good,” Remus whispers. And he means _good job_ but he also means _you are good_ and _it is good_ and _we are good_ and _everything is going to be good_. “I’m going to bind your wrists now.”

Sirius does not protest, does not even move, and Remus doesn’t worry, because they used to do this so often it was practically routine. He dips into a crouch, his knees creaking in protest, and touches his wand to the juncture of Sirius’s hands. “ _Incarcerous_ ,” he says, and thin ropes shoot out from the tip of his wand and circle around Sirius’s wrists like small snakes.

He stands again, and circles Sirius three times more, each as slowly as the time before, just _looking_ , until he cannot help but touch. He comes to stand directly in front of Sirius, and he reaches out one hand to run it through Sirius’s long, impossibly soft hair. He starts by pushing a few errant strands out of his face, and then digs his hand through as much of Sirius’s hair as he can, close to the scalp, and he _grips_. Hard. Not quite tugging, not quite pulling, just gripping.

Sirius’s head jerks back from the force of it, but he does not falter, eyes still trained on Remus.

“Stand up,” Remus instructs, hand still tangled in Sirius’s hair.

Sirius does, swaying only slightly with the lack of use of his hands. He is no sooner eye-to-eye with Remus than Remus is spinning him around, pulling his back flesh against Remus’s torso. One of Remus’s hands moves swiftly and assuredly and comes to rest on Sirius’s neck, applying enough pressure that Sirius _knows_ what it wants and not enough to actually cut off air, not yet. Remus finally yanks, pulls Sirius’s head back against his shoulder, and brings his lips to Sirius’s ear.

“You are mine now,” Remus whispers. It’s not a warning, it’s a promise. “You will do what I tell you.” Sirius nods, tears prickling at the corners of his closed eyes. “This,” Remus releases Sirius’s throat and closes his hand firmly around Sirius’s cock, “Is mine. I will do with it what I want.”

Remus brings his hand back to encircle Sirius’s throat, a bit harder now, and continues to speak, short, certain statements meant to convey _this is what we used to do, in case you’ve forgotten_ and _I know you’ve probably forgotten_ and _you can let go_ and _I’ve got you_ and _what I want is what you want is what I want_.

“I need to know that you remember what to say to make me stop,” Remus says, voice strong and tender. “What will you tell me if you want me to stop, Sirius?”

Sirius swallows hard, even though Remus’s hands continue to apply relatively little pressure to his throat. “Hippogriff,” He croaks.

“Good,” Remus replies, still so close to Sirius’s ear that his breath ghosts across the lobe and Sirius shivers. “And what will you say if you want me to slow down?” Remus asks, with as much tenderness.

“Phoenix,” Sirius replies.

“Good,” Remus says. And it is, _so_ good. Better than he thought anything could be ever again. “And will you use them, Sirius? Will you tell me if you want me to stop?”

When they used to play, so many years ago, Remus never used to ask this, never felt it necessary. But now he does, because it’s been so very long and because he wants to remind Sirius that his words matter here.

Sirius nods.

Remus kisses Sirius’s temple and tightens his grip on Sirius’s throat, and he tastes the sweat now dripping down Sirius’s forehead and feels his entire body tense.

He gives one final tug to Sirius’s hair and then begins to trail his hand down his lover’s chest, over collarbones that stick out like jail bars and to his left nipple, which Remus pinches with zero warning and even less finesse. Sirius moans, squirms in his lover’s arms.

“You still like that,” Remus says, not asking.

Sirius nods.

“You used to love it when I’d play with your nipples. You’d beg me to pinch them,” and he does, “and bite them,” and he spins Sirius around again, just as quickly, and pulls their hips roughly together, hard cocks bumping each other through the fabric of Remus’s joggers, and bites down on the nipple he was pinching moments before. He pulls it between his front teeth and tugs so that he feels them scrape over the tender flesh, and brings the hand not digging bruises into Sirius’s hip to the opposite nipple, mimicking the motion as best he can.

Sirius’s head falls back, his hips jerk into Remus and he lets out a groan so soft that Remus only feels it in the vibration through Sirius’s chest, does not hear it, and the lack of sound is deafening, is so completely _un_ -Sirius.

“No,” Remus says, but his mouth is still so close to Sirius’s chest that he’s not sure Sirius really hears what he says. “No,” he says again, this time bringing himself back to his full height so his eyes are near-level with Sirius’s. “I can’t do this if I can’t hear you.” He didn’t mean to say it, but it’s true, so he doesn’t backtrack. “I need to hear you, Pads,” He says, harsher than he meant, so he brings his hand to stroke the side of Sirius’s face, which is wet with sweat or tears or both, and says again, more gently, “I need to hear you. Can you let me hear you?”

Sirius doesn’t move for a moment, but his eyes dart back and forth between Remus’s as if he’s actually _considering_ the question, _thinking_ about his answer and Remus doesn’t know if this makes him feel sad or smug or proud but the Sirius he used to know didn’t consider, didn’t think, just did.

Finally, Sirius nods, and swallows hard against something in his throat. “Yes. I can,” He says. His voice is gravely and hoarse, but it is steady, so Remus nods and continues.

“Get on your knees,” Remus commands.

Sirius drops to one knee, and then the other, steady now even against the binding at his wrists.

“Do you remember how much you used to like it when I fucked your mouth, Pads?” Remus asks, stroking his hands through Sirius’s hair once again.

Something flashes behind Sirius’s eyes, something like recognition or desire or maybe just lust. He smirks, ever so slightly. “Yes.”

“Do you remember how you used to beg me for it?” Remus asks.

This time the flash is brighter, the smirk bigger. “Yes,” Sirius replies.

“Do you remember how I’d sometimes make you beg for hours before I’d finally give it to you?” Remus asks.

 _Fuck._ “Yes,” He says.

Remus considers him for a moment, considers the situation, and drops the waistband of his joggers just enough that his fully erect cock juts out against Sirius’s face.

“Go on then,” Remus says. Sirius moves to open his mouth and take Remus into his throat, but Remus tugs sharply on the back of Sirius’s head so that he jerks back, clumsily, and looks up at his lover questioningly.

“Beg me,” Remus clarifies.

Sirius swallows. Apprehensively, he readjusts his knees on the floor so that his half-hard cock has more space, and then looks up at Remus. “Please,” He says. There is an overwhelming earnestness in his tone. “Please, Moony. Please let me suck you. I want it. I need it. _Please_.”

Remus had intended to drag this out longer, but Sirius seems so genuinely desperate, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t feeling just as desperate, too.

“Good boy, Sirius,” Remus says, admiringly. “I know that was hard for you. Go on, darling.”

Sirius takes Remus into his mouth hesitantly, worried he’ll just be jerked back again, but Remus does the opposite, gripping the back of Sirius’s head and thrusting ever so slightly further into the wet, _familiar_ comfort of Sirius’s mouth.

“ _Fuck_ , Pads,” Remus pants, throwing his head back. He’s in trouble, if he’s losing control so quickly, but he mostly doesn’t care.

He allows Sirius a few moments to get used to the feeling, to circle his tongue experimentally around the head of Remus’s cock and let the weight of it rest on his tongue. Soon enough, Sirius is bobbing his head slightly. His eyes are closed, and Remus can’t help but look at him. When he does – and to his great relief – Sirius looks peaceful, calm, dropping into the fuzzy realm of ecstasy.

“I’m going to fuck your mouth now, Pads,” Remus says, when he’s sure Sirius is ready. “Is that okay?”

Sirius nods around Remus’s cock, and Remus can feel the back of his throat begin to open, ready to let Remus in, as if the memories of this very thing in the muscles of his neck had simply been lying dormant all those years they were apart.

Remus starts small at first, slow thrusts into Sirius’s mouth, only far enough to hit the back of his throat and then pull back. Tears are beginning to prickle at the corners of Sirius’s eyes again, but he looks up at Remus longingly, so Remus picks up the pace a bit.

The first time Sirius gags, it catches Remus off guard, lost to the glorious sensations. But when he pulls back again, Sirius moans around him, pleading eyes begging for _more please yes_. So Remus thrusts into his mouth again and again, deeper and deeper each time, and begins to push Sirius’s head down onto his cock in time with his movements.

“Pads… _Sirius_ …oh you take my cock so well, darling, so very well…you’re so good for me…”

 _You are good_ , Sirius thinks. _You are good_. _You are good. You are good._

The mantra overcomes him, pushes him into a deep, soothing pool of all the things he has forgotten how to feel. He belongs to Remus. Remus has him. He is good, for Remus he is good.

He opens his throat even wider, and Remus is fucking his mouth so deeply now the base of his cock is nearly touching Sirius’s lips on each thrust. It is the best thing Remus has felt in a long time, the warm wetness around his cock and the look of serenity on Sirius’s face and the lov–

“Oh _fuck_ …” Remus pulls out of Sirius’s mouth quickly with an audible _pop_ , and every muscle in his body fights him, but he does not want to come, cannot come, not until he knows Sirius has been anchored.

He closes his eyes and breathes slowly, collecting himself, and then looks down at Sirius. His lips are puffy and dark pink, and saliva coats his entire chin. His eyes are glazed over with a film of something misty. He looks…

“You are _beautiful_ , Sirius,” Remus says, knowing he wouldn’t, normally, in this particular role, and also knowing he _has_ to say it, for his own sake if not for Sirius’s.

“Stand up,” Remus says, placing a guiding hand around Sirius’s elbow to assist him.

When Sirius is at eye level again, Remus brings his mouth against Sirius’s swollen lips, just feeling the touch of delicate skin on delicate skin for a moment before he traces the seam of Sirius’s mouth with his tongue. Sirius opens up to him, always opens up to him, and he can taste the muskiness of his own cock and the spiciness of Sirius and he is absolutely positive he has not felt this much of anything since a particular Halloween many years ago.

They kiss for a long time, until the rush of imminent orgasm fades from Remus’s body, and then he directs Sirius slowly towards the bed, still rumpled and unmade from restless sleep.

“Lie down, Sirius,” He says. “On your back.”

He helps Sirius onto the bed, and only when Sirius has finally laid his head against the pillow does he realize that Sirius has probably not _been_ in a bed in…far too much time. He knows in that instant that he will not be sleeping alone again, not so long as Sirius is with him.

“Spread your legs for me, darling.” His voice cracks a bit, there are the beginnings of a sob deep in his throat, but he pushes it down.

Sirius looks so vulnerable, all visible ribs and bound wrists, but he stares right at Remus as he spreads his legs, slowly, like an invitation and a warning, _I am giving you this, please treat it kindly_.

Remus climbs onto the bed and kneels between Sirius’s open legs.

“Do you trust me, Sirius?” He asks. It’s a very big question. It’s a very dangerous question. But Sirius nods. “Use your voice, Pads. Answer me.”

“Yes,” Sirius whispers. “Yes, Remus. I trust you.”

 _You shouldn’t_ , Remus wants to say. Because wasn’t it trust that broke them apart so many years ago, trust in the wrong people? But he does not, just reaches out and runs his hands over Sirius’s torso.

Remus’s hands are so warm, so big and tender and calloused, that though all he’s doing is running his hands over Sirius’s belly, thighs, hips, Sirius has to close his eyes or the sensation will overwhelm him.

Remus reaches into the drawer of his bedside table for the bottle of fancy Muggle lubricant he invested in a while ago, and places it on the bed next to Sirius.

“Look at me, Pads,” He says, running a single finger over Sirius’s entrance. Sirius opens his eyes reluctantly. “I’m going to open you up for me. I want you to look at me. I want you to watch me while I get you ready for me. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Sirius says. “Yes. Please.”

“Good boy, Padfoot.”

Remus begins very slowly, with a single, generously coated finger, and runs it teasingly over the surface for several moments longer than necessary, until he can feel Sirius begin to buck gently against him.

Finally, he enters Sirius’s body, just a single digit. Sirius moans hoarsely at the sensation and a small shudder overtakes his body, but he remembers his command and keeps his eyes trained on Remus’s face. Remus, on the other hand, _has_ to close his eyes, because the feeling of Sirius around his finger – unbelievably hot, tight, almost _new_ – overwhelms him.

He gives Sirius just a moment to adjust and then begins thrusting gently, in and out, eventually crooking his finger expertly to graze across his prostate.

“Oh, _oh_ …fuck,” Sirius moans, and throws his head back only for a moment.

Remus fucks him slowly with a single finger, massaging back over his prostate on every few thrusts. He intends to do this a while. He intends to do this a _long_ while. He is going to anchor Sirius to this moment like several tons of pure steel.

“Please, Moony,” Sirius finally moans. “More.”

“I’ll decide when you get more, Padfoot,” Remus replies with a stern look.

It is probably actually far too many minutes of Remus’s world-renowned patience and Sirius’s recently renewed wordy, desperate begging before Remus concedes and slicks up a second finger, pressing it into Sirius’s body _unreasonably_ slowly.

Sirius squirms on the bed, claws his toes into the mattress and fights against the rope around his wrists. Maybe he’d remembered the way Remus liked to positively _torture_ him, and maybe he hadn't, but either way it is…

“Moony, _fuck_ , _please_!” Sirius nearly screams.

Entirely unbothered, Remus just continues his same rhythm with two fingers, though he drops a small kiss to Sirius’s thigh. “You’re doing so well, darling,” He says. “You can hold out. I know you can.”

In their younger years, Sirius would have disagreed, would have reminded Remus that he cannot, in fact, hold out for basically _anything_ and if Remus doesn’t fuck him _right this moment_ he will scream. But now, now Sirius has developed an inhuman tolerance for torture, for indefinite waiting. And so long as Remus keeps pinning him with those warm, infinite eyes, he can.

By the time Remus prepares a third finger, he has gotten so comfortable between Sirius’s thighs he could stay there through lunch, and perhaps afternoon tea, and maybe dinner, too. Sirius is so tight his body resists three of Remus’s fingers regardless of how long he has spent preparing Sirius. Remus’s leaking cock jumps at the thought of how Sirius will feel around him.

“Ah, _fuck_!” Sirius yells as Remus pushes past the resistance and into his body. He will wait, but he never said he’d be quiet about it.

In and out, taking all the time in the world, Remus opens Sirius’s up for him.

“You’re here,” Remus says reverently, and rather unexpectedly, though he does not stop his ministrations at all. Sirius looks at him curiously, unsure if Remus is saying _you are here, with me_ or _you are here, in the room_ or _you are here, free_ but Sirius hears all of the above, and all of them are true, so he lets himself rock into Remus’s measured movements.

They stare into each other’s eyes, Remus fingering him open and Sirius meeting his thrusts with small movements of his own hips.

“Untie me, Moony. Please.” Sirius doesn’t know what makes him say it, but it is suddenly something he needs like he needs his next breath.

Remus looks at him very concernedly and stills his fingers. “Are you trying to use your safeword, Sirius? Do you want me to stop?”

Sirius shakes his head violently. “No. No, don’t stop. I just…”

“What is it, love?” He is worried. So, so worried.

“I just…I _have_ to touch you, Moony. Please. _Please._ ”

Remus’s mouth curls into the most satisfied smirk Sirius has ever seen and he removes his fingers slowly from Sirius’s body, eliciting an entirely pathetic whimper.

“Sirius?” Remus asks very patiently, wiping his fingers on the bedspread. “Do you know how I used to decide when you’d finally had enough, when I’d finally give you what you wanted?”

Suddenly, Sirius can picture oh-so-clearly just how Remus Lupin would have fit so perfectly into the role of Professor.

“No,” Sirius says honestly, desperately, because even if his memories were more than hazy photograph negatives in the back of his mind, he knows he’d never have been clever enough to figure out what made Remus tick.

Remus reaches again into his bedside table and extracts a condom. “You’d ask me to untie you.”

And in very rapid succession, Remus unbinds Sirius’s wrists, sheaths his fully erect cock, lifts Sirius’s hips, and pushes into Sirius with all the haste he hadn’t shown in working Sirius open.

Sirius screams. He _screams_. Not an Azkaban-induced, nightmarish, blood-curdling scream, but a _fucking holy fuck,_ euphoric, otherworldly kind of scream. Remus, somehow, has angled his cock so it perfectly rubs up against Sirius’s prostate on each, glorious snap of his hips. It takes him a moment to realize that his hands are now free, but as soon as he does, he lifts himself onto one elbow and claws into Remus’s already scarred chest with long, bony fingers.

“Oh…shit, Pads…” Remus collapses over Sirius’s body, pinning him to the bed, unable to hold himself up and experience _this level of pleasure_ at the same time. He pistons his hips with a fast, brutal rhythm that will send him over the edge far sooner than he intended, but Sirius feels like heaven around him, like home, and he could not stop now even if he wanted to.

Sirius brings his arms around Remus’s back and holds him so close, grips at his skin for something to hold onto, but he doesn’t need it, not anymore. He is anchored. Even if Remus’s full bodyweight wasn’t securing him to the bed, he can feel the constant, squirming thing inside his body start to calm.

“Moony… _Moony_ ,” He says. He is crying now. Or…Remus is. Or they both are.

“Padfoot…Sirius… _fuck_ , love…” Remus answers, as if they are having an entire conversation in the meeting of their hips.

His own climax fast approaching, Remus lifts onto one elbow just enough that he can reach in between their bodies and grasp Sirius’s cock with his free hand. He moves his fist sloppily up and down, desperate to get Sirius off before he does, but when Sirius brings his own hand down to circle Remus’s, to stroke him together, Remus loses it. He buries his head in the crook of Sirius’s neck and bottoms out and comes, deep inside Sirius, back where he belongs.

Remus’s orgasm is strong and overwhelming, nearly painful in its intensity, but he registers the way Sirius continues stroking himself between their bodies and kisses Remus’s hair and says his name over and over and finally reaches his own climax with a full-body shudder and a deep, guttural sob.

“I’m sorry, Sirius,” Remus pants into Sirius’s neck after they’ve both come down from their highs, still one giant tangle of sweaty limbs. “I wanted to get you…you were just so…”

“Shut up, Moony,” Sirius responds, jovially, and swats Remus lightly on the arse. “You just gave me the best fuck of my life, and the only reason you’ll need to apologize is if you don’t do it again in about an hour.”

“ _Christ_ , Pads,” Remus chuckles, bringing his hand to brush over Sirius’s forehead, moving strands of wild hair out of the way so he can see, clearly, the face of Sirius Black, the one that will always be beautiful, no matter what. “I’m _old_ now, remember?”

Sirius just looks at him, eyes wandering over his face, over the little freckles only visible from this close and the wrinkles that form at the sides of his eyes when he smiles and small scars accumulated over many years of lacerating things. “No,” He says. “No, you’re exactly the same.”

He isn’t. Neither of them are. And, finally, that’s okay. 

To be continued.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So um, don’t pin people up against walls and kiss them unless you have their explicit permission to do so. Or unless your long-lost lover has just escaped from a twelve-year prison sentence for a wrongful conviction and has come to stay with you at your cottage because he is still a wanted man and is honestly being a real shit. Actually, even then, just go ahead and ask first.


	4. Interlude: The Cross You Left Behind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, dear readers:
> 
> Something funny happened with this chapter. I'd been wrestling with it every single day, until I finally realized the trouble I was having with it was that the kink scene I wanted to write was not yet ready to be written. A.k.a., I was not yet ready to write it. I'm stating that here, openly and honestly, because the whole point of this fic is that we get to use sex and kink to heal us whenever and however we choose, but only when we are ready. 
> 
> So, I am honoring the fact that I am not quite ready, and posting this little chapter instead. I'm calling it an "interlude", because it marks the bit of time between reclaiming the thing you thought you'd lost (in this case, Remus and Sirius's relationship) and realizing you also have to face what has hurt you (represented, here, by Grimmauld Place). I'm sorry of that seems weird and choppy. I'm posting it a few days early so I can get to working on what comes next. 
> 
> Anyway, hoping I don't lose you here. I SWEAR this fic has a happy ending, honestly.
> 
> Thank you for your patience. Humans are odd. Lovely, but odd.

They had exactly two weeks of reprieve until everything went to shit again.

Well, that’s not entirely true. They had two weeks of rutting up against each other in the bed they now shared in Remus’s cottage before Sirius, specifically, started to turn back into an anxious mess.

The problem was that they were basically always sweaty. The humidity in the North had reached record highs, so they wandered the cottage shirtless and often trouser-less and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They continued to drink tea even when perspiration was already dripping down their faces, and they licked it off each other like the ladybugs that had taken over the garden, licking dew drops off each blade of grass. They lit fires at night even though it was unseasonably warm, so they had every excuse to strip naked and fuck right in front of it, and the fires wicked the moisture from the air and provided just enough respite from the humidity to justify them curling up together.

But they didn’t talk much. They had it out about the early years, about the mistrust and the cheating and the suspicion. But mostly, they were quiet. Far too quiet. Remus read and sent letters and corresponded with The Order, and sometimes put records on the old phonograph that used to belong to his grandmother. Sirius mostly slept. He hadn’t slept much in Azkaban, the environment not quite lending itself to peaceful rest, so he fell asleep everywhere. The armchair in the library was his favorite, because it smelled so thoroughly of Remus, but sometimes he’d fall asleep right at the kitchen table or when he sat down in the afternoon to read The Daily Prophet, even once fell asleep in the bathtub (which upset Remus so much he hadn’t let Sirius bathe alone since.)

Remus went through a full moon, chaining himself up in the horrible shed leftover from his childhood transformations. He didn’t resist when Sirius insisted on keeping him company as Padfoot, though all he did was curl up on the dirt floor and growl at the wolf when it got impatient enough to try chewing through its restraints.

But two weeks in, the silence was getting to Sirius, and he was as restless as ever. In between fitful naps against every available surface, he’d started to feel rather like a house cat, and he’d never much been one for cats. So, two weeks, eight blowjobs, one full moon, and 113 cigarettes in, Sirius is sitting at the kitchen table transfiguring tea bags into paper airplanes with Remus’s wand when he brings up what can only be described as “A Horrible Idea”.

“What about the house?” Sirius asks, out of nowhere.

“What house?” Remus says, not looking up from the letter he is writing.

“Grimmauld Place.”

Remus pauses mid-sentence, puts his quill down, takes off his reading glasses, and looks over at Sirius as if he were wielding a deadly weapon. “You’re not serious…”

“Actually, I–”

“Forget the pun, Padfoot.”

“You’re the one who said it.”

“Pads,” Remus said, voice softening. “That’s…it’s… _mad_.”

Sirius shrugged. It was, in many ways. So was he. So was the world. What was one more thing. “You said we need a headquarters.”

“We do, but–”

“I have a house.”

“I suppose…but–”

“We can use it.”

“ _Sirius_.” Remus has his Professor Voice on now, the one Sirius has gotten rather used to over the past few weeks (and, in the right circumstances, quite learned to enjoy). “You can’t go back there.”

Sirius shrugs again. “’S mine now. Can do with it whatever I please.”

Remus gets up to make tea (again. They really are going through the stuff unreasonably quickly.) He has his back turned when Sirius speaks again. “I’ve not been back since I was sixteen, Remus, surely I can handle it.”

Remus stills for a moment, his hand on the kitchen faucet he finally repaired with a simple fixing spell. “That’s not true, Pads. You were there a few months before…before Halloween.”

That’s what they’ve started calling it – “Halloween” – because to call it “The Night That Everything Went Belly Up and Our Best Friends Were Killed by Our Former Other Best Friend Which Resulted in Sirius Spending Twelve Years Accumulating Seven Lifetime’s Worth of Trauma in Azkaban” would take too long.

Sirius accidentally singes the tail off one of the paper airplanes. “I…”

Remus turns back to him, resting his hip against the kitchen counter. “You don’t remember.”

It’s not a question. They’ve done this little dance several times over the past couple of weeks, whenever one of them (usually Sirius) brought up something from the past that the other (always Remus) had to clear up for him. Sirius hadn’t realized his mind had been quite _so_ tampered with, knew his memories of the twelve years he spent inside Azkaban were a fuzzy collection of fleeting images and sounds and smells and feelings, but hadn’t realized that the Dementors had impacted his pre-Azkaban mind so much as well.

Sirius closes his eyes and searches, searches the recesses of his memory the way you try to remember the name of an acquaintance, _knowing_ it’s there but only sometimes being able to access it.

Remus has taken a seat back at the table, only this time has chosen the chair right next to Sirius. He reaches for one of the small paper airplanes and twiddles it between his fingers. “Regulus’s funeral,” Remus says.

Sirius opens his eyes with a start and trains them on Remus’s face – on his anchor – as the memories come back to him. “Oh,” He says, and it’s steady but a bit strangled.

Regulus had been missing for at least a year by the time anyone arranged an actual service, but Sirius only found out a few days prior. A letter had arrived by Muggle post at the flat he shared with Remus, sender unknown, alerting him of the small memorial that was to be held at Grimmauld Place the following Sunday. He’d immediately torn it up, tried to set it on fire, ran it under scalding water, but the unassuming little letter would not be destroyed. Each time he tried to get rid of it, it just returned mockingly to its pristine, white, typewriter-written shape. Eventually, Remus had come home, found a very frazzled Sirius hurdling hexes at it and burning hole after hole in their carpet, and fucked him through a very long night of a very many emotions. By Saturday, Remus had convinced Sirius he would regret it if he did not attend, but by Sunday morning he was a wreck again, so–

“You went with me,” Sirius says, this last memory hitting him as suddenly as the ones before.

Remus nods. “I did.”

They stare at each other silently for a moment.

“You’re _barmy_ , Remus,” Sirius finally says. “Why on _earth_ would you agree to see those wretched people? _Willingly_?”

Remus chuckles, leans over and plants a tender kiss on Sirius’s forehead before getting up to tend to the kettle.

“James went too,” Remus says after several moments, placing a mug and a plate of biscuits in front of Sirius.

(Peter had also attended, but Remus didn’t see any particular need to mention that.)

Sirius picks at a biscuit absentmindedly, his eyes gazing at something in the distance. “Right, yeah.” 

Remus sips his tea, all the while staring over the top of his mug at Sirius, hawk-like and alert for whatever is coming next.

“I’m not going to take it up the arse in the same bed where I was _conceived_.”

Unexpected.

“Excuse me?” Remus asks, lowering his mug.

“Well if you’re going to fuck me in my mother’s house, we’re bloody well not going to do it in _her_ bedroom.”

Remus stares at him. “Sirius…”

“We’ll take one of the guest rooms…”

“Sirius.”

“…Put Beaky in my mum’s room, she’d _love_ that.”

“ _Sirius_.”

Sirius looks up at Remus as if he’d forgotten there was another person in the room. “What?”

“I really don’t think it’s a good idea, you going back there. On top of everything else…” Remus says, regretting it the second the words are out of his mouth.

“Everything _else_?” Sirius asks, bitingly.

“I just mean…” What did he mean? He means that he spends every waking hour afraid that Sirius will wonder off in a haze and get himself locked up again, or worse yet that he’ll wander off on purpose. He means that he feels like he’s walking on eggshells all the time, that often Sirius seems about as present in the room as his own mum, who has been dead over a decade now. He means that he’s scared, all the time, that he is simply not capable of being enough, that Dumbledore has once again overestimated him, that he cannot hold this adrift enigma of a human being in one space for much longer. He does not say any of this.

“It’s done,” Sirius says. Remus looks at him questioningly. “I’ve already offered it to Dumbledore. It’s done.”

Remus pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers and lets out a very deep sigh.

The day of Regulus’s memorial, Sirius awoke at six in the morning, screaming. He screamed and screamed, screamed until his voice was raw and his throat hurt and he was finally fully awake, finally back in reality. Remus made him tea to soothe his throat and rubbed his back slowly and helped his shaking limbs step into his dress robes and side-along apparated him to the big, black house – the big, Black house. But when Sirius got within two meters of the front door, he stopped dead. He froze, his legs unmoving and his eyes gazing up at the front door as if it were a dragon, and one he was entirely unprepared to fight. James had shown up, and Peter, and together they quite literally _carried_ him the few remaining steps to the door.

But James and Peter are gone now. Remus will carry him again, will carry him right up to that front door and over the threshold, if that’s what Sirius needs. But he wonders, in passing, how long he can go on like this, carrying the man he loves, with no one to help him hold the weight.

To be continued.


	5. The Penitential Hymn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, readers!
> 
> Well, this chapter finally came together. It takes place towards the beginning of Order of the Phoenix, but no worries if you haven’t read that in a while. All you need to know is there’s that one scene where [Remus is canonically a top] Sirius and Molly are fighting and Remus tells him firmly to “sit down”. I have way too much fun with that scene [because JK Rowling has always been queerbaiting garbage]. In this instance, it turned into…this, and at first I was like, “REMUS, where is this sadism coming from??” but then I remembered that I am the one writing the characters, so I was like, “MADDIE, where is this sadism coming from??” and then I had therapy. 
> 
> Anyway, Remus is a lil sadistic here. It’s all ethical and consensual and followed by aftercare and all those very necessary things, but if that’s just not your thing, skip the post-OOTP Harry’s first night at Grimmauld Place scene (halfway-ish through the chapter) and go find Daddy Dom Remus later in the fic. Other content warnings for semi-intense anal play, depending on what your definition of “intense” is. (There’s large, insertable things.) There’s also some abuse of alcohol and some pretty crappy consent practices on the part of one of our little pairing, here, but there’s also some solid boundary-setting around said crappy practices. 
> 
> Continued thanks for the comments, kudos, bookmarks, subscriptions, etc. and as always, take care of yourselves, wear your masks, wash your hands, drink water, and enjoy!

They walk over the threshold of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place not like newlyweds, but like old, bitter divorcees.

They’ve been fighting all morning. And last night, too. Actually, they weren’t so thrilled with each other yesterday afternoon, either. And now that you mention it, yesterday morning wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows and…okay…they’ve been fighting a lot.

Two people can have the same fight a hundred different times in a hundred different ways and it always comes down to the same thing: how the bloody _fuck_ do you put a gay werewolf and a queer ex-convict in the same house and expect them to just carry on?

(That might not exactly be the _universal_ predicament of couples everywhere, but surely it is not just them.)

They had a fight about apples. They bicker over sleeping patterns. They squabble over the news and the lack of news and Harry and The Order. They had a _fight_ about _apples_. But their biggest argument over the past several days has been about Grimmauld Place. Ever since Sirius announced that he would be returning whether Remus liked it or not, Remus says “it’s a bad idea, Sirius” and Sirius says “It’s my choice, Remus,” and they’re both too wound up to realize that neither of them are actually stating things that are contradictory. It _is_ Sirius’s choice, and it _is_ a bad idea. But they are talking right past each other, communicating in concentric circles around the same axis, and that axis is that Sirius is not well.

Sirius doesn’t so much walk over the threshold of Grimmauld Place at all, actually, as he does stumble, because he started drinking at 9 AM today and cheekily countered Remus’s protests with an already slurred, “It’s Sunday brunch, Remus!”

(It’s a Tuesday.)

Remus didn’t have to carry him to the door this time, so that’s…something, but Sirius wasn’t slobbering drunk the last time he was here, either, so the progress is negligible if existent at all. The front door opens to Sirius with the sluggish ease of being a doorknob a great many very inebriated Blacks have had to finagle with over the years, and the first thing that hits Remus is the smell.

The first thing that hits Sirius is the bannister.

And then Remus helps him up _(“bloody…was that staircase always so close to the door?”_ ) and deposits him on a gaudy chaise lounge just inside the parlour with a cloud of gray dust and an exhalation of extreme exasperation. Sirius passes out and Remus gets momentarily distracted by the unreasonable beauty of his red-faced, sloshed, sleeping form before he sets to the task of beginning to clean the entryway.

If only they weren’t two grown men repeating the same unholy rituals of their teenage years.

Remus is not equipped to handle a dwelling the size of Grimmauld Place, and his household charms leave a little to be desired. The house resists his magic at every turn, somehow _knowing_ he is not worthy of its obedience, and he gives up far sooner than is entirely in character for him and sets instead to the task of finding him and Sirius a suitable room to occupy. He climbs the stairs and quickly quiets the shrill screams of the portrait of Sirius’s mother with a lazy flick of his wand (his silencing charms being much better than his cleaning charms, thankfully). There are a truly perverse number of bedrooms and floors in The Noble and Most Ancient House, so he bypasses the second floor entirely just for the hell of it and finds himself on the fourth floor (the _fourth floor_. Of a _single house_. In _London_.) before he knows it. It may be entirely in his imagination, but the ceilings get lower and lower the longer he stares at them, and the cobwebs in every corner get thicker and grayer and some probably even play host to spiders.

There are five doors on the fourth floor, each of them closed, almost daring him to open them and reveal the secrets hidden within. Dark magic floats in the air like the dust mites that are visible in the rays of sun that peak through the cloudy windows. One does not have to be a former Defense Against the Dark Arts professor to sense that this house has held a great deal of darkness, in artifact and magic and person alike, and he _loves_ Sirius, but he is already feeling tired and suffocated and he can’t quite imaging spending more than a few miserable days here.

He traipses gently to the double doors at the far end of the hallway, worried he’ll awaken whatever still lives in this house if he makes too much noise, and takes a deep, preparatory breath before opening them wide. The doors creak at the hinges and leave a visible trail through the dust and dirt and who-knows-what-else that has accumulated on the Noble and Most Ancient Hardwood Floors. He walks into the room with the air of someone who knows he very much would never have been welcome to do so if its previous occupants were still alive, and surveys the scene around him. The room is, impossibly, _huge_. A gigantic mahogany bed the size of Remus’s entire kitchen occupies the space in the middle of the room, adorned with a rich emerald and silver bedspread that has probably always been charmed to look as fresh and new as it must have fifty years ago. Across from the bed is an equally grand brick fireplace and two tall, wingback armchairs, both upholstered in striped fabric of alternating emerald and silver. The heavy curtains, each made of enough fabric to adorn every single window in an average-sized family home, are, unsurprisingly, emerald and silver.

“Well, do you think perhaps Slytherins used to live here?” Remus says sarcastically to no one but the extravagant furniture, which he _swears_ answers right back with a low, threatening growl.

He is about to back out of the room – allowing himself just a _hint_ of smug satisfaction at the thought of Buckbeak shitting all over the Noble and Most Ancient Persian Rugs – but a small, gold-framed painting above the dresser catches his eye. As he approaches it, the image comes into clear view, and he realizes it is not a painting at all but a vivid, colored photograph. A young boy – maybe two or three – dressed to the nines in the kind of dress robes no young boy need own, looks over his shoulder and smiles timidly at the camera before returning to his task of carefully stepping over each crack on a narrow, cobblestone pathway. The photograph appears to have been taken in some sort of garden, as lush, pristinely trimmed hedges of dragons and mermaids and unicorns can be seen in the background. Bright, multicolored flowers bloom all around either side of the pathway, which itself gives the distinct impression that it goes on for a very long while.

The garden is not what captures Remus’s attention, though. It is the boy. His thick black hair has been slicked back and his little legs wobble a bit with the uncertainty of being rather new to the act of walking, but it is his eyes that draw Remus in: small, silver, they glisten, hold depths that dip far below the blue-grey irises and betray the kind of shy, unquenchable curiosity that little ones naturally have, until they outgrow it or until…until they are given reason to fear the things they don’t yet know.

Something hits Remus in the center of his chest like a particularly nasty bludger. The little boy is, unmistakably, Sirius. Sirius, presumably still an only child, who someone took the time to photograph. Sirius, who hangs in a frame on a wall in the room that belonged, for a very long time, to his parents. Sirius, who hated his parents more than he hated anything, more than he hated Severus Snape or Brussels sprouts or the grouchy old woman who once made Harry cry at the park. Here, on the wall, small but visible from the bed his parents slept in and the chairs across from the fire, prominent enough that his mum would have to see it every time she reached for a piece of jewelry and his dad would have to see it every time he opened the drawer for a pair of socks.

Out of sheer curiosity, Remus glances behind him (as if someone might be watching), and then reaches over the dresser, lifting the frame only slightly from its fastenings. It is heavy – solid gold, probably – but it moves. Which means it is not adhered to the wall with the kind of naive magic performed by someone who thinks they will always love their child, always want to look at him, the kind of Permanent Sticking Charms Sirius used to adhere motorcycle posters to his bedroom wall out of its own kind of stubborn naivety. No, this photograph has been kept here on purpose. It has been seen and dusted and maybe even cherished.

Remus stares at it. He stares and stares and watches the boy smile over his shoulder, turn, lift his little knees as high as they’ll go in his starch-stiff trousers, and walk away from the photographer. Over and over the little scene repeats, has repeated, will repeat for all of infinity, which is only slightly less time than Remus stands there, staring. He is finally shaken from his thoughts by the wails of Mrs. Black’s portrait and retreats from the room, wondering if he can silence her quickly enough that she does not wake Sirius.

Sirius, who is currently drunk and passed out in the house he ran away from. Sirius, who is unwell. Sirius, who somehow used to be a boy who smiled shyly at his mother before returning again to the dreamy, childlike fantasies of his own creation, in which the worst thing he had to worry about was avoiding the cracks between cobblestones.

* * *

A week passes in relative peace, and Remus does not bring up the photograph. He sets them up in a small, sparsely decorated room that is nondescript enough to not bring up too many painful memories for Sirius, and together they start to tackle the insurmountable task of getting the estate in decent enough shape for headquarters. During the day, they attempt cleaning and tidying and organizing charms on the great many rooms, and the vast majority of them have no impact at all. (Probably due in no small part to the fact that it is actually just Remus doing the work, while Sirius follows him from room to room and smokes cigarette after cigarette and drinks glass after glass of the Firewhiskey they found in the pantry.) At night, they cook mediocre dinners in comfortable silence and pretend like either of them would have willingly chosen any of this.

In a few weeks, the Weasleys will join them, their large brood offering much-needed help in sheer number of hands, and in the meantime Remus attempts to keep Sirius’s spirits up by fucking him against the Noble and Most Ancient Furniture and mentioning that maybe Harry will be able to spend a bit of time with them, too.

Sirius’s spirits aren’t going anywhere any time soon, though, because less than twenty-four hours until the next full moon, Dumbledore drops by and announces that Remus will be spending the next few days in The Netherlands, attempting to infiltrate a small werewolf colony just outside Rotterdam. 

“They’ll trust you more if you transform with them, Remus,” Dumbledore says, and Remus is not entirely sure if he believes it, but he parrots it to Sirius anyway – “They’ll trust me more if I transform with them, Sirius” – and by the time it reaches Sirius _he_ does not believe it at all.

“Yeah, or they’ll eat you for breakfast,” Sirius says back.

“Only _you_ get to eat me for breakfast,” Remus replies, hoping to lighten the mood.

The mood doesn’t go anywhere, either.

So Remus goes to The Netherlands and has the worst transformation he’s had in a while and accomplishes nothing outside of gaining a few new scars and drinking some rather delicious Dutch hot chocolate (which, to be entirely fair, was not “nothing”, especially in Remus’s book).

Mostly, though, he worries about Sirius, so the second he steps back through the door at Grimmauld Place, he drops his battered rucksack on the floor and calls out Sirius’s name with a bit more urgency than intended. Sirius does not reply, but Walburga certainly does, so Remus follows the piercing squawks of the woman he only met once up two flights of stairs, until he finds Sirius standing stock-still in the open doorway of a room on the third floor.

Remus is so caught off guard by the image of Sirius standing _still_ that he lets Walburga carry on for longer than is strictly necessary, and only silences her when he realizes Sirius cannot hear him over her screeching.

“ _Sirius_ ,” he says, though he has the presence of mind to stay a few feet back.

Expectedly, Sirius startles, spins around and points his wand at Remus.

“It’s only me,” Remus says, holding his hands in the air nonthreateningly, and…wait… “Where did you find a wand?”

Sirius pockets the wand and turns back to the room. Admittedly, Remus was expecting a bit more of a welcome home considering he might have, you know, _died_ , and he looks just as good as if he had done, anyway, but he lets it go because Sirius looks, well…unwell.

“Love?” Remus asks, approaching him gingerly and placing a hand on his shoulder.

Sirius gives no indication that he is aware anyone else is in the house at all, and when Remus turns to read the plaque on the open door, he begins to understand why. _Regulus Arcturus Black_ , it reads, and when Remus surveys the room, it appears that nothing has changed since the first night that Regulus did not come home over fifteen years ago. His traveling cloak still hangs over the back of the desk chair, which is pulled out at an angle as if its occupant has only just gotten out of it. A stray sock – silver and green striped – peaks out from under the bed, which has been made with all the precision of Proper English Training, but it is mussed slightly, dented in the middle, as if its occupant had laid down on it again once it was made. Or maybe not its occupant, maybe its occupant’s mother, who would have entered the room of her missing son and, overwhelmed with grief, collapsed onto the bed. She would have breathed in the scent of her child, not the bergamot and sandalwood of the sophisticated aftershave that still sits uncorked on the marble shelf of the armoire, but _him_ , tinged forever with the scent of the blood – her blood – that covered his tiny body the first time she held him in her arms.

It is so hard to imagine, that the woman whose portrait hurdles slurs at Remus every time he passes it once grieved a child, once kept a photograph of her firstborn hung on her bedroom wall.

“Pads,” Remus says, very gently, “How long have you been standing here?”

Sirius does not answer, but it is early afternoon and he is still in his dressing gown, so that alone tells Remus what he needs to know.

Remus tries again. “Where did you find the wand?”

“Kreacher,” Sirius says dazedly.

“Oh,” Remus says, though he has several more questions about that particular disclosure. “Whose is it?”

Sirius stays quiet, giving again no indication that he has even heard the question.

All Remus can do now is The Thing: let down his guard enough to create enough vulnerability for the both of them, and try to catch Sirius’s gaze, and say something that is true. “I’m worried about you, Pads.”

Sirius’s face tenses a bit, but at least he’s heard. “Don’t be.”

It’s entirely unconvincing, coming from a man who wreaks of booze and has at least a few day’s stubble on his face and is staring into the room of his dead, estranged brother.

Remus laughs humorlessly. He didn’t quite mean to. “Okay then. Worry gone.”

Sirius does not look at him, cannot look at him, because he knows he holds everything in his eyes. “I’m not a child, Remus.”

It’s an entirely childish thing to say. But sometimes they both forget that time stopped moving for the twelve years Sirius was locked in his prison of body and mind, that he is more or less the same age he was when he went in, and that age was, more or less, the age of a child.

Remus is kind. Remus knows this. Remus is still, always, worried. But Sirius turns to him, looks him in the eye for the first time, and that is something.

“You look like shit, Moony,” He says.

There’s a tiny bit more genuine humor in it when Remus laughs this time. He brings one hand to stroke absentmindedly through Sirius’s hair. “Always such the sweet talker.”

Sirius doesn’t smile, but his dull eyes light up a bit.

“Was it…bad?” Sirius asks apprehensively, as if afraid of the answer.

Remus shrugs. “It was fine.”

As if on cue, one of the deeper gashes across his cheek starts bleeding again, and Sirius brings his fingertips to the tender skin just below it, as if he can heal it with the warmth in the capillaries under his skin.

“I’ll fix it,” Sirius says.

“It’s no bother, Pads, it’ll heal on its own,” Remus replies, not because he doubts Sirius’s abilities at healing charms (which were, in fact, always something Sirius did quite well back in school), but because he still doesn’t know whose wand Sirius has gotten ahold of, and he doesn’t know if Sirius has slept at all in the past two days, and because it feels wrong to Remus to be healed by someone so clearly in need of healing of their own.

And then Sirius does something both odd and entirely unsurprising. He lunges at Remus, throws his arms around Remus’s neck, and kisses him hard and deep. Remus stumbles back, having not been expecting it. When his brain catches up, he leans into the kiss for a moment, grips Sirius’s hips with his hands and thrusts his own tongue into Sirius’s whiskey-sour mouth, but it is abrupt and not right and forced and Sirius is just so very _unwell_.

“Sirius, wait,” Remus says, detaching their lips by pulling back from the kiss rather than pushing Sirius away.

Sirius attempts to kiss him again, their lips meeting for only a moment before Remus leans back further.

“ _Wait_ , Sirius,” He says, a bit firmer now. “This isn’t a good…this isn’t quite the right…”

“It’s the _perfect_ time, Moony,” Sirius says, and his voice is lustful but it’s also a little desperate with something that’s not desire at all.

He moves to kiss Remus again but Remus plants a firm hand in the middle of Sirius’s sternum. “Sirius, _no_ ,” He says, and he didn’t mean for it to sound so harsh, but he’s also not the one with the questionable sobriety status.

Sirius doesn’t have the energy to look hurt, so he looks apathetic instead, and reaches for something that might be Remus’s cock, but they’ll never know because Remus catches his wrist with quick reflexes and a firm grip and holds it up in front of Sirius’s face, right in between them, as if to say _look at this, look at what you’ve done_.

“We’re not going to do this, Sirius,” Remus says, stern and paternalistic, and he doesn’t entirely know what he means by “this” but he knows that if he doesn’t put a wall up now, he never will, and then there will be nothing to protect him from intruders and invaders and armies and attackers, so he does something he doesn’t do often and lets his heart do the talking before his mind can step in. “We’re not going to fuck right now. We are not even going to kiss. We are going to close this door and we aren’t going to open it again. And then, we’re going to go downstairs, and make you some food, and put away the liquor, and have a kip before we return to making this wretched place fit for human habitation.”

Sirius stares, wide-eyed, and opens his mouth to protest but doesn’t.

“Do you understand?” Remus asks, still holding Sirius’s fist in front of him. “Do you understand, Sirius?”

Sirius nods, slow, deliberate, eyes never leaving Remus’s.

“We are not going to drown here, Padfoot,” Remus says, and he finds that he is talking to himself as much as he is the man he loves. “We are _not_ going to let this break us.”

Sirius nods again, and this time it isn’t in answer to a question. It is an agreement. It is a vow. If Remus is going to be his anchor, then he has to stop trying to float so far away.

Without daring to look away from Remus, Sirius reaches behind him, and he closes the door.

* * *

When the Weasley’s arrive, things get better. Sirius makes more of an attempt to actually help with things, and though he clashes with Molly occasionally, the act of tidying the house gives them all a purpose, something they can throw themselves into instead of reflecting on the many other problems at hand. When Remus is not taking his shifts in Little Whinging or The Ministry, they bond over worrying about Harry, over unspoken frustrations with certain commanding old wizards and their certain rules and restrictions, and even the news that Harry has had to fight off two Dementors doesn’t shake Sirius too badly (perhaps because Sirius has a small glimmer of hope that Harry will indeed be expelled from Hogwarts, and have no choice but to move in with them, but neither of them address that, directly).

The night Harry arrives, there is a rather expected row. Sirius and Molly square off about what Harry should be told, what is best for him, who cares for him more, an entire litany of things with complex answers or no possible answers at all, and the fact that Remus wholly expected it does not make it welcome.

Once everyone has finally gone to bed, they return to their own bedroom. Remus has barely enough time to close the door behind them and cast a quick imperturbable charm when Sirius rounds on him. It’s a good job his spellwork is decent, because Sirius is yelling.

“So I’m your house pet then, is that it?” Sirius asks, yells, arms gesturing wildly.

Remus sits on the edge of the bed and begins to untie his shoe.

“You say ‘jump’ and I say ‘how high’? You say ‘sit’ and I just sit?”

_Well you did, didn’t you?_

Remus does not respond, does not even look at Sirius, just pulls off his sock.

“Is that how it’s going to be? Everyone gets to decide what to do except _me_? He’s my Godson, Remus, don’t I get some say in what…he should…he’s _my Godson_!”

Sirius is pacing the small room very quickly, hair wild and face red with agitation. He removes the button-down shirt he is wearing with shaky fingers, it suddenly being far too hot against his fuming skin. Remus places his hands on either side of him on the bed and braces himself for what will inevitably be a rather extended outburst.

“And _Molly’s_ an absolute…well she just thinks…heaven forbid anyone else…he’s _my Godson_!”

Sirius isn’t finishing any of his sentences, can’t seem to find the end of the thought once the beginning occurs to him, so he keeps pacing, and fuming, and starting sentences he cannot finish, and meanwhile Remus sits and watches and is so bloody _calm_ and–

“SAY SOMETHING, REMUS!” He bellows.

“I didn’t want to interrupt you,” Remus answers, and it might be sarcastic but it might just as well not be, and _that’s_ as annoying as anything.

“How can you be so _...rational_?!”

“Sirius, will you sit down?” Remus sounds tired. Remus _is_ tired.

“No! _No_! I do not just… _sit_ whenever you tell me to!”

_You bloody well do._

“Fine then,” Remus says, voice so full of patience and calmness and _rationality_. “But you have to at least _try_ to understand where Molly is coming from, Padfoot, she’s just worried–”

“And _I’m not_?!”

“–About Harry–”

“Who is _my Godson_!” 

Sirius is pacing faster now and the floors creak on every other step. Remus is patient, impossibly patient, but he is also tired, and it is late, and he’s not so thrilled himself about the scene in the kitchen.

“I know, Sirius, but… oh for heaven’s sake, Sirius, will you _please_ sit down?”

“Make me!”

Sirius stops dead, turns his entire body towards Remus, and once the words are out of his mouth he realizes that they are as much a request as they are a challenge.

Remus frowns at him, then stands up, back straight and chin lifted so what little height he has on Sirius seems like an entire tower’s worth, and walks the few steps to where Sirius is standing.

“Sit down.”

Sirius looks up at him, roots his feet to the ground and crosses his arms over his chest. He looks sixteen again. He _feels_ sixteen again, all uncontrollable emotions and the smell of the old, stodgy house around him.

“No.”

Remus tilts his head to one side and looks Sirius up and down. He is always so calm, so threateningly calm, but the way his eyes bore through Sirius’s body sends a little shockwave down his spine, straight to his cock.

“Padfoot,” He says, patient, measured, threatening, all at once. “I don’t think you’re going to like it if I have to make you. Now _sit. down_.”

Sirius has no intention of sitting down. Remus knows Sirius has no intention of sitting down. But he narrows his eyes anyway, as if considering it, and then looks Remus dead in the eye and says, again, “No.”

Remus deigns to sigh, as if this is all terribly off-putting and inconvenient for him, and then begins walking, slowly, around Sirius. There is an energy buzzing between them now, voltaic and dangerous, and suddenly Remus is very, very awake. Without warning, he wrenches Sirius’s arms behind his back, pulling Sirius hard against his body, and brings his lips to Sirius’s ear.

“Very well,” He says, and moves Sirius forward until his knees collide with the bed. Remus pushes him over easily, so that Sirius’s chest comes to rest on the mattress and his feet stay trained on the floor, all the while Remus holds his hands firmly behind his back.

“I suppose,” Remus says, through gritted teeth, “If you’re going to _insist_ on not sitting, I’ll just go ahead and make it so that you _can’t_.”

The promise in Remus’s voice hits Sirius deep in the chest, and he shivers. Anger radiates through him in big, uncontrollable waves, and he fights back against Remus’s grip, but Remus overpowers him with hardly any effort at all, partially because he wants to be overpowered and partially because he has half the muscle mass he once did. They struggle for what feels like a long time, until Sirius is exhausted and some of the anger starts to seep from him, out through his feet and into the rug below.

"Padfoot,” Remus says once Sirius has stilled, voice stern and unquestionable. “I am going to let go of your arms now. And when I do, you are going to keep them _exactly_ where they are.”

To his surprise, Sirius finds that he does. Remus steps away from him, busies himself with something Sirius cannot see, and he lets the firmness of the bed against his chest and the certainty of the floor against his feet and the safety of _Remus_ in the air give him the solace he cannot find in himself.

Remus returns moments later, drops a few things on the part of the bed Sirius can't see, and runs warm, calloused hands up and down Sirius’s arms, over his back, down to his arse, which he hits with a single, stinging smack. “That’s it, Pads,” He says. “You just need me to be rough with you tonight, don’t you?”

Sirius nods, his face rubbing up against the satin duvet.

They’ve been back at this long enough that Remus does not stop, does not insist on talking about it, does not remind Sirius that he can stop this whenever he wants to. Sirius knows. Instead, he takes his cues from the tension in Sirius’s neck, the sparks of metallic, unsettled magic in the air around him, the way he moves his feet ever so slightly wider apart on the floor, inviting _more_.

He reaches around Sirius and undoes his belt and the zipper at the fly of his trousers. Roughly, he wriggles all of it down to his ankles, and shifts Sirius’s feet further apart with his own knee, so that Sirius is bent wide, open for him, arms held obediently behind his back, waiting.

Sirius feels exposed, raw, undone. The anticipation of not knowing what Remus is planning to do – spank him or fuck him or just leave him there and walk away – hardens his cock and the muscles in his back until he is solid, unrelenting, ready for anything.

Still, when Remus’s fingers make contact with his backside again, he startles.

“Are you ready to do what I tell you now, Pads?” Remus asks, running his palms soothingly over Sirius’s arse.

Sirius nods, and Remus stills. “Y-yes. Sorry. Yes.”

“Yes, _what_?” Remus asks.

“Yes, sir.”

It is rare, that they play with this kind of power, the named kind, the “sir” kind. But Sirius needs to be held, body and mind, given someone to overpower him and dominate him and own him so that he can finally give it up, that precious control, and then maybe he can start to get some of it back.

“Hold yourself open for me,” Remus says, slicking up his fingers.

Sirius grasps his arse cheeks and holds them apart. It’s uncomfortable, and he’d do it for the rest of his life, because he will, truly, do anything Remus tells him, and pretending otherwise is only ever very poor acting.

Remus cannot help but stare. Sirius – his Sirius – opening to him in all the ways, opening his mind and his soul and his body, and the deep purple of the entrance he only ever lets Remus into, and for a moment Remus forgets that he has a role, a job to do, to keep his Sirius here and open.

He runs his index finger over Sirius’s hole and Sirius pushes back into it. He doesn’t take his time, forces two fingers inside of Sirius’s body abruptly and they tug him in, deeper. Sirius stifles his moan in the bedspread and pulls Remus even further into him.

“You like this, don’t you, Pads?” Remus asks, scissoring Sirius open. “You like it rough and raw? Like to _feel_ it when I make you mine?”

Part of the game would be for Sirius to say “no”, to pretend like this isn’t exactly what he needs, but all the fight leached out of him right along with his strength and now he is just a human incarnation of surrender, just loose putty in his master’s hands. Little sparks of anger try to flare up in his chest, try to gather and start a fire big enough to burn through everything good. But the stinging in his arse holds them at bay, and Remus’s free hand resting gingerly on his hip seeps a warmness into his bones that greets the sparks, embraces them, introduces them to heat that doesn’t have to corrode.

His arsehole stings as Remus adds a third finger, too quickly, not quickly enough, and with each spark of pain he relaxes just a little bit more into the floor. He could get lost in the anger, or he could get lost in the pleasure-pain, and the former won’t make him come. So he leans into it, pushes back into the sting. Remus must decide that this means he is not pushing Sirius hard enough, so he adds a fourth finger.

Sirius hisses through his teeth but does not try to move away from the sensation, being both too stubborn and too intent on pleasing his sir, his Remus.

“Look at you,” Remus says, fingers as rough as his voice, intentionally avoiding Sirius’s prostate so the only pleasure he gets is mixed with the pain of being stretched. “Look at how desperate you are for something up your arse.”

Sirius nods again, quicker this time.

“Tell me,” Remus says. “Tell me, Pads, just how much you want something to fill you up?”

“P-please,” Sirius whispers.

“Hmm,” Remus hums, disappointedly. Sirius is slipping under now, slipping under that fog of endorphins, of lost control, where everything is possible and nothing is real. But even under the fog, his heart skips, his stomach lurches, he will _not_ disappoint his master.

“No, sir! Please…” Sirius says, louder, and pushes back into the fingers Remus has begun to remove from his body. “Please, sir. Please. I want it. I _need_ it. I… _oh._ ”

The long, calloused fingers leave his body and he is empty, a vessel of space for the anger to fill up again, but Remus’s hand remains firm on his hip, and he is leaning back into the space where Remus’s fingers used to be, holding himself open wider and harder and begging to be filled again.

“Do you deserve to feel good, Pads?” Remus asks, casually, rhetorically, because Remus wishes Sirius got to feel good all the time, but that is _not_ the point of the game. “Or do you deserve to be punished?”

“I deserved to be punished, sir,” Sirius says back, automatically, so used to feeling deserving of bad things.

That’s not it now, though. He does not say it because it will bring him bad things. To run off, to recklessly risk his life, to fight back, to yell, to argue, to scream at the woman he knows has loved his Godson better than he’s ever been able to himself, _those_ are the bad things. To tell Remus what he wants to hear, in this moment, in this game, is just falling backwards, blindly, and enjoying the free fall knowing Remus will always catch him.

“Yes,” Remus agrees. _Yes, you deserve to be punished. Yes, I will catch you_.

Remus mutters a quick cleansing spell under his breath and then the blunt head of a long, thick butt plug breaches the rim of Sirius’s hole, just a little, but the smallest part of its tapered, glass shape is still relatively large. It is cold and unexpected, his muscles unprepared for it, and Sirius retracts from it, instinctually, but holds himself open still.

“Tell me why, Padfoot,” Remus says, inching the toy into his resistant body slowly, so slowly, so that it is somehow more torturous than if he’d thrust it in all at once. “Tell me why you deserve to be punished.”

It is a sign of something unbreakably holy between them that Sirius does not answer back, “ _because of everything_. _Because I wasn’t ever meant to cherished.”_

“Because I am yours,” He says instead, like a statement of fact, like it should be accompanied by an obvious little shrug. “I am yours, Moony. And I didn’t listen to you, didn’t… _oh fuck_ …do what you told me.”

“That’s right, Padfoot,” Remus responds, “and now you will take whatever I give you.” Such a promise. Such a delightful, dangerous promise.

Wider and wider Sirius stretches, his rim expanding as the circumference of the toy grows larger, unreasonably so, and he does not remember buying it but he does remember thrilling at the sight of it, wondering just how it would feel breaching his body, stirring at the challenge of taking it, all of it, for Moony.

Now, though, he feels as though he might have been a bit headstrong. The size of it would push him to his limits even fully prepared, and Remus has opened him only enough that the toy does not do any serious damage. He begins to shake, little tremors through his hands and arms, up his shoulders, down his spine. He buries his head in the bedspread and lets it muffle the sounds of his pained moans, but still he holds himself open.

“You look so good, stretched for me,” Remus says. And it’s true. _Oh_ , is it true. The beautiful spun glass of the massive toy contrasts with the angry, dark purple of Sirius’s arsehole and Sirius has broken into a sweat, a thin sheen now coats his back and arms and neck as they tremble, body fighting against mind, and Sirius ignores it all, takes it all. “For me.”

Sirius grows dead silent as the thickest part of the plug begins to breach his body, and concentrates only on keeping himself open, upright, conscious. Remus’s fingers stroke unwittingly over his hip, a gesture of care Remus is probably not even aware he is doing, and then Remus brings his mouth to the middle of Sirius’s back and plants a long, open-mouthed kiss to his sweat-slick skin. The sensations compete – Remus’s warm, soft tongue against his skin and the cool, hard glass of the toy stretching him, stretching him, stretching him, his body resisting it and his mind inviting it in.

“Almost there, Pads,” Remus says, resting his forehead against Sirius’s back to ground himself, for comfort, as if their bodies are one, as if what opens Sirius opens him too and what hurts Sirius hurts him too and…

_There._

Sirius’s rim closes around the bulb of the toy so that all that remains outside his body is it’s flat, cylindrical base. The heaviness of it inside him holds him to the spot, anchors him, and his body involuntarily unclenches, loosens muscles Sirius didn’t even know he was tensing. His shoulders slacken and begin to slide and he will let himself fall right off the bed, hit his head on the hardwood floor before he will stop holding himself open, because Remus hasn’t said he can stop yet.

But he doesn’t have to, because Remus has the reflexes of a survivor of war, and has one strong, steady arm around Sirius’s middle before he can so much as think of falling.

“Woah, Pads,” Remus says, holding him steady with one arm and continuing to rub little circles into his hip with the other.

Sirius’s muscles have relaxed, but every part of him is still shaking, intense little seizure-like tremors through every muscle in his body like women during afterbirth when the hormones of having done an impossible thing flood the body with relief. There are probably as many hormones flooding Sirius’s body now, but mostly he shakes from resigned anger, and the heavy pain in his bottom, and because it is safe to do so, because he can, because Remus will hold him.

“You can let go of yourself now,” Remus instructs, and as soon as Sirius does his arms go completely loose. Sweat is rolling down his forehead, down his back, into the dips above his collarbones, and Remus licks at the little beads absentmindedly. “Christ, Sirius. You took that so well.”

Remus is aware that he has dropped his persona a bit, but he cannot help it, he is awed at the things Sirius will do – will take – just because he tells him to, just because he knows Remus will keep him safe. He is high on that trust, and it scares the living shite out of him, so much so that he is sure some of the tremors he can feel radiating off Sirius’s body are actually his own. Remus is not hard, but Sirius is, his cock is dripping onto the floor, both because the pressure of the toy on his prostate mandates it and because Sirius has always been so intrinsically turned on by the deleterious pushing of boundaries.

Remus reaches around him with the hand not circled around his middle and grasps his leaking, rock-hard cock. He pulls Sirius up, so that his naked back is flush with Remus’s clothed front, and Sirius’s head lolls back onto Remus’s shoulder. Remus brings them onto the floor, so that both of them are resting back on their heels. The exposed base of the butt plug is only slightly visible now between Sirius’s parted, bent legs, and the only sounds he makes are tiny, near-wounded whimpers.

Remus kisses his temple, his cheek, his hair, whatever his mouth can reach in this awkward position, but for now he just holds Sirius’s cock, lets it rest heavy and hard in his hand. “How does it feel, Pads?” He asks.

Sirius shuts his eyes, cannot possibly think, so just says the first thing that comes to mind. “Full.”

Remus smiles into Sirius’s neck and lets a small laugh escape his lips. “I’ll bet, darling. I believe that is the point.”

“Big,” Sirius says, a few more words making their way to the forefront of his hazy mind. “Hurts.”

“Is it too much?” Remus can’t help but ask. “Do you want me to take it out?”

Sirius shakes his head jerkily, so a few errant strands of his hair hit Remus in the face. “Hurts good,” He says. “Wanna come.”

Remus’s own cock fills a little. “Oh yeah?” He asks, and then remembering his role, “do you think you’ve earned it?”

Sirius nods. The tremors have died down a bit.

“Have you learned your lesson?” Remus asks, a gravelly whisper into Sirius’s ear.

Sirius nods again.

“Tell me,” Remus prompts. “Tell me what you’ve learned, Padfoot.”

Sirius has barely the presence of mind to think that this really isn’t quite a fair question, what with his cock as hard as solid granite and a butt plug the size of a small planet up his arse, but still he reaches for some semblance of coherence, and says, “Didn’t listen to you…didn’t do what you told me.”

Remus nods now. “Yes. And will you ever do that again?”

Sirius shakes his head “no”, and it isn’t true. He’ll continue to have ornery little fits of frustration, continue to forget that Remus probably knows what’s good for him better than he does, at this point. But in this particular moment he means it entirely, and that’s all either of them can ask for, games being what they are.

“No, what?” Remus asks, just to be a bit of a bastard, really.

Sirius groans. “No, sir.”

Remus caves then, and begins moving his fist lazily but firmly up and down Sirius’s shaft, rock-hard with a physicality that has only somewhat to do with arousal.

Sirius feels that his body should, really, not be quite so eager to come after ordeals the likes of which his arsehole has just gone through, but there is probably something trauma-y and Azkaban-y and body memory-y about all of that and he is positively _leaking_ precum either way, so he lets it be unsurprising that it takes all of fifteen pumps of Remus’s hand until Sirius is coming with such wracking convulsions that the experience isn’t entirely pleasant. 

All of Sirius’s negligible weight is already being held up entirely by Remus, so he doesn’t so much as sag when every ounce of strength in his body leaves him with the thick ropes of spunk that land on the floor. But he does very much wish he could _kick fucking Remus fucking Lupin in the fucking balls_ because he’s still feeling the aftershocks of the most bizarre orgasm of his life when Remus begins removing the plug from his arsehole, and if every nerve ending in his entire body is already raw and exposed, it is nothing compared to the way the stretch of his anus sends burning pinpricks through every inch of his skin.

And…he likes it. He’ll never say it out loud. But, actually, he _loves_ it.

The last of the plug leaves his body with an absolutely obscene squelch and he can feel lube drip from him and onto the floor, and _damn it_ he shouldn’t like that so much either but he is so stretched, so open, so completely, entirely _wrecked_ , and it is, quite possibly, the only thing that could have pulled him back to earth tonight.

Sometimes, lately, (and, not so lately) there are fire ants that crawl under his skin and when they bite, he’d just as soon crawl out of his own body as he would hurdle unreasonably vitriolic words at his Godson’s mother-figure, or pick fights he’s not even entirely sure he’s invested in. But Remus has brought him back. He has stretched him open enough for the fire ants to crawl out and invited him back into his own body by pushing the limits of what his body can do, and all he can feel, other than bone-deep fatigue, is gratitude.

He sinks into the gratitude as Remus cares for him, tenderly wipes him with a charmed-warm flannel and applies a thin coat of a healing salve Sirius has only just realized has been within arm’s reach the entire time. He works silently, helps Sirius up onto his knees so he can apply another layer of salve, but Remus’s hands are talking to him, somehow. He can feel their chatter, the way Remus’s fingers communicate with the knotted muscles under his own skin and say _there, there_ , and say _we always take care of you_ , and say _thank you,_ for some reason.

Sirius is half asleep by the time Remus gently helps him to his feet, folds the blankets on the bed down just enough for Sirius to slip under them, and makes him drink an entire glass of water. He removes his own clothes and turns off the lights with a flick of his wand, and then settles into the bed behind Sirius, planting one tender kiss to his forehead before draping his limbs over Sirius like a rather protective monkey.

“’S a bad punishment,” Sirius says, sleepily, after several moments of silence.

“What?” Remus asks, opening his eyes from his own near-sleep. “Why?”

“Because. Now every time I try to sit, all I’ll be able to think about is you.”

Remus smiles in spite of himself. Not such a bad punishment, then. He closes his eyes again, and they’re both asleep within seconds.

To be continued.


	6. The Cruelty or the Grace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, sweet readers!
> 
> Is everyone hanging in there? The majority of this chapter (blessedly only 5,500 words, are you proud of me??) is just one extended impact play scene. If that's not your thing, I invite you to skip it, or stick it out and see if it appeals to you more than you thought! Whatever you need.
> 
> A quick note on language from a grumpy theologian: I do not believe in calling people “broken”. As I’ve said to colleagues, we are humans, not pottery. There is a point in this chapter in which Remus notes that Sirius looks broken, and it is bizarrely important to me that you know that is not meant to describe someone inherently, just the way Sirius appears in that particular moment. You are precious, I am precious, we are always whole, even if we don’t always feel like we are.
> 
> Okay. Thanks for humoring me. Moving on.

Summer turns to autumn, and against all odds, they continue living.

Sirius wanders. He is an untethered, free-floating balloon, cut from its string but nonetheless stuck within the confines of the walls of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. He bounces from room to room as if discovering each of them again for the first time. It is, perhaps, a small silver lining of the damage Azkaban has done to his memory that he has not retained the complete picture of his time here. Sometimes, he will walk into a room and find that he has no memory of it at all, that it is a blank canvas on which he can paint whatever he likes. (When this happens, he usually finds Remus, brings him into the room, and christens the new memories with their moans, with their sweat and cum, the most holy baptism either of them has ever believed in.)

He remembers his parents room, though. Or, more accurately, he remembers _not_ remembering his parents room. One early afternoon, something stubborn and brave overcomes him, and he finds himself standing in front of the grand double doors, hand hovering near the doorknob but not yet touching it. Remus is on another mission, otherwise he’d ask Remus to do this with him, but he also knows in some intrinsic, deep-seated part of himself that this is something he needs to do alone.

It is nothing but raw hatred that makes him finally wrench the doors open, hatred for his parents and this house and this blasted forbidden room and what it always represented, the secrets and the hierarchy and the distance. Some part of him is disappointed when he steps into the absurdly large space and finds…normalcy. The furniture is grand and old and doused in Slytherin pride, but _everything_ in this house is. This room is just…a room.

When Sirius was a child, he would sneak into Regulus’s quarters at night and they’d crouch down into the space under the grand picture window, where the moonlight would illuminate just enough of each other’s faces that they could pretend that there was light, that everything wasn’t gloomy and dark and bleak. Together, they’d imagine what mysteries their parents’ bedroom housed, what mysteries shrouded it in such secrecy they’d each been thrashed more than once for simply going near it. They imagined complex, dark artifacts that yielded unimaginable consequences when touched, and ugly, forbidden creatures that their parents would tend with the kind of care they failed to show their human children. They imagined cauldrons steaming with thick black smoke, and enticing gold boxes the likes of which Pandora herself couldn’t imagine, and, when they got a bit older, lascivious objects with unknown uses.

What they never imagined was a bedroom as innocuous and ordinary as any other. Sirius lifts up each corner of the large, Persian rug that lines much of the middle of the room, and checks the flue in the fireplace, because surely, he is missing something. He notices the dresser and has just started to wonder if it is safe to go rummaging through the drawers when he spots it:

The photograph.

He does a rather theatrical double-take, at first just because it is so out of place. Blacks don’t take _photographs_ , they force their children to sit still for hours in horribly uncomfortable positions for portraits that will hang in the hallway like pieces in a museum, something to be proud of but not something to look at. _Photography_ is a common Muggle hobby, an uncomplicated invention no self-respecting Pureblood dare utilize.

But then, it’s the subject of the photograph that freezes him to the spot, because he _remembers_ that day. They were on holiday, Sirius and his parents, in the south of France, maybe. Or Germany, or Scotland. That part he doesn’t remember. But he remembers that his mother was pregnant with Regulus, and Sirius was fascinated with her large, protruding belly. Every night, he’d climb into her lap and place his ear on the stretched skin, thinking that if he just listened hard enough he’d be able to hear his little brother, calling to him, saying “Sirius, we’re going to be the best of friends!”, saying “Sirius, we are going to be family, forever!”. What’s more, she let him. Walburga, who never so much as brushed a stray piece of hair from his eyes once he turned six, would wrap one arm around him and let him rest on her, bare skin against bare skin. That day, in the garden of whatever country they happened to be visiting, Sirius could remember feeling safe, loved, cherished. He swears that if he thinks on it long enough, he can _remember_ the photograph being taken, his mother’s voice saying his name, Sirius turning towards it, Walburga’s belly proceeding her, promising life and love and family. 

But he is seeing things, surely. Or the Dementors have gone and implanted false memories in his head in replacement of the ones they’d taken away. Or…or maybe his parents just kept the photograph there to throw darts at it, or hurl hexes at it, or just… _shout_ at it, every night, like a ritual to replace their loveless lovemaking because they stopped being in any kind of love just after Regulus was born.

It doesn’t make sense. It can’t make sense. But those are without a doubt his own eyes staring back at him, small and innocent and trusting. So, impulsively – as Sirius Black does everything – he takes the photograph off the wall and hugs it to his chest. He wraps his arms around it like it is an actual child, like he is holding Harry or Remus or even the little boy in the photograph, himself. Things didn’t turn out the way that little boy thought they would. And yet, Sirius holds him. And if Sirius can hold him, love him, protect him, then maybe things turned out okay after all.

He takes the little boy, the photograph, to the room he shares with Remus, because it will be safe there. Because in that room, there is love. Sirius places him atop their own dresser, and hopes he will find respite from the memories of wanting, of touching his mother’s belly, of slowly feeling the warmth drain from every part of her, of realizing family is not always actually forever. And – it’s impossible, he knows – but he thinks he sees the little boy relax a little bit. He feels himself relax a little bit, too.

* * *

Autumn turns to winter, and against so many compounding, impossible odds, they continue living.

But Sirius has been miserable and everybody knows it.

He is a _terrible_ liar, and an even worse actor. All Christmas break, he oscillated between cracking manic, rather unfunny jokes and disappearing all together. Having Harry around lifted his mood, until Sirius realized Harry would leave again. And having the Weasley’s staying at Grimmauld Place so they could be closer to where Arthur was being treated at Saint Mungo’s made him feel useful for the first time in a long time, until even that just served to remind him how very _un-_ useful he’d felt otherwise.

So the day that Harry and the rest return to Hogwarts for spring term, Remus decides to throw him a party.

Well, not really a party, more a gathering. The remaining Weasleys are there, and Kingsley, Tonks, Moody, Mundungus (he wasn’t really invited, he just kind of…showed up.) Minerva drops by for a quick “hello” before returning to Hogwarts herself. Even Tonks’s parents, Ted and Andromeda, drop by with a mince pie and a few stories of Tonks’s childhood (which had everyone laughing, except for Tonks herself, whose hair turned a vicious shade of reddish-pink to match her cheeks.)

It was doing wonders to raise everyone’s spirits. Except for Sirius’s.

Remus has been trying all night. He’s gathered small plates to bring to Sirius of Molly’s roast and the various confections brought by their guests, but Sirius picks at them distractedly and then tosses them out when Remus isn’t looking. He’s chosen all of Sirius’s favorite records to play and even, once, thrown caution to the wind and tried to get Sirius to dance with him, pulling him into an awkward embrace that ends when Remus stumbles over the coffee table.

If anything, Sirius’s mood seems to be getting _worse_. At first, he was grumpy. Then he was passive. Now he just kind of seems…gone. When he’s not idling in the kitchen he’s standing in front of the huge, gaudy portraits that line the parlour walls as if studying them like he hadn’t seen them every day of his childhood, and hated them ferociously, besides. 

Eventually, Remus gives up on trying to force the brooding man into enjoying himself, and has struck up a rather tedious conversation with a still-very-scratched-up Arthur about safety deposit boxes when Sirius taps him on the shoulder. He excuses himself but is still distracted by Arthur’s exuberant enthusiasm when Sirius begins talking.

“I need to go somewhere else.”

Remus turns to him. “Oh! Okay. Do you want to go upstairs for a bit, or–”

“No.” Sirius doesn’t quite look ill. He looks stuck. Frozen, almost. His arms are crossed protectively over his chest and his shoulders are hunched. He is very pale, almost pallid, and is looking around the room as if Voldemort himself is about to jump out at any moment. “Remus. I need to go _somewhere else_.”

The “oh” that crosses Remus’s mouth is silent, but his face shifts into something sober and reverent. He grips Sirius’s tense shoulders in his hands and crouches down just enough to be exactly at eye-level. “I understand, Sirius. Go upstairs, to our room. I’ll be right there.”

Remus ducks his head, trying to catch Sirius’s gaze, but whatever Sirius is seeing right now is a million miles away and he stares, unblinking, at something in the general direction of the floor. He nods slowly, as if moving through water, and Remus carefully watches him climb the first few steps of the garish staircase to make sure he doesn’t fall.

It takes Remus a while to excuse himself, long enough to tell Molly that Sirius is ill and assure everyone that they should stay as long as they'd like. By the time he has finished the piece of fruitcake Molly has insisted on feeding him – _“you’ve always been too thin, dear”_ – it’s been at least twenty minutes.

He climbs the stairs unhurriedly at first, so as not to worry anyone, but begins taking them two at a time when he is out of sight. He knows what Sirius needs when he’s like this, how desperately he needs to not be alone, and by the time he finally opens the door to their bedroom he has worked himself up into half a panic.

Sirius is naked, kneeling on the floor, head bowed and hands clasped behind him. It is a gesture of the kind of obedience the obeyer needs more than the obeyed. Remus’s heart drops deep into his intestines, takes up residence somewhere where it can be more protected, less exposed. Sirius looks so very _broken_. And yet, Remus thinks he knows - _hopes_ he knows - just how to put him back together.

He steels himself, straightens his back and drops his shoulders, and walks a straight line to Sirius, who gives no indication he is even aware of Remus’s presence. _I will make you a sanctuary_ , Remus wants to say. He won’t, it’s not what Sirius needs right now, and instead he says, “Sirius, give me your wrists.”

Sirius presents his wrists like an offering, but moves no other part of his body. It takes Remus only a moment to fumble in the dresser for the soft black rope kept there. Moving with all the intention and precision of a military officer, he ties Sirius’s wrists, tighter than he would normally, because he knows the indentations will ground Sirius even after Remus has had his way.

“Good, Sirius.” He will use nothing but Sirius’s God-given name tonight. He will use it often, calling Sirius back into the space a little bit more each time. “Stand up.”

Sirius still holds his wrists up as he stands, but his gaze stays trained on the floor.

“Yes, Sirius. Good. Now get on the bed for me, on your elbows and knees, while I prepare.”

Sirius does, though dazedly, and positions his knees wide apart so that Remus can just start to see the dark, inviting place between his buttocks.

If Sirius was listening to anything but the impossibly loud silence in his own head, he’d hear the opening and closing of familiar drawers, the subtle sounds of Remus removing his shoes, then unbuttoning his shirt. As it is, the first thing he is conscious of hearing is Remus’s voice from somewhere behind him, deep and tinny the way it is only in these moments.

“I don’t need to you speak, Sirius,” Remus says, knowing Sirius probably couldn’t speak right now anyway. “But I need to know you can tell me if you want me to stop. You will nod if you want me to keep going, and shake your head if you don’t. I will be watching closely. Do you understand?”

Sirius nods.

“Show me what you’ll do if you want me to stop, Sirius.”

Sirius shakes his head.

“Good, Sirius. Good.”

Remus moves to the side of the bed and places one hand on Sirius’s bowed shoulder while the other begins to caress the smooth skin of his backside. He rubs slowly, soothingly, and then suddenly brings down one hard, stinging slap.

The sound of it rings through the room like a gunshot, and Sirius shuts his eyes tight and winces in a way Remus knows is a sign of the kind of pleasure only pain can bring.

“Good, Sirius.” Remus is back to caressing now, soothing the biting pain. “I am going to take care of you, Sirius. You don’t need to do anything. You only need to take it.”

Sirius’s body floods with the relief of being completely helpless, of knowing he has no responsibility in this moment but to take what Remus gives him. This, he can do. 

Two more loud spanks sound in the room, and then a third. In between, Remus rubs the quickly reddening skin of Sirius’s arse gently. “You’re doing so well already, Sirius. I am just getting started. I am going to take such good care of you.”

Sirius can feel himself starting to sink into that wonderful, ethereal, abstract place. Something in his chest loosens a bit.

“I am going to give you ten spanks on each side, Sirius, okay? Count them in your head for me.”

Remus doesn’t wait for confirmation before he begins a steady, quick rhythm, varying the intensity of each slap so Sirius can’t start to expect what is coming next. Sirius counts in his head, but the numbers begin to appear as colors and patterns behind his eyelids so that by the time he reaches “ten”, he feels the number more than thinks it.

“Good, Sirius, so good.” Remus is rubbing the sensitive skin again, and then the firm, grounding skin of his hands is gone.

Remus picks up the short, black leather paddle from where he’d placed it on the bed beside Sirius’s body. He rubs it against his palm, feeling the leather warm to his skin, and slaps it experimentally to give Sirius a small indication of what is coming next.

“Do you want me to continue, Sirius?” Remus asks.

Sirius nods, eyes shut and wrists bound in front of him in such a way he could be praying. His cock is hard, has been since the first touch of Remus’s skin on his, but for now he pays it no mind.

“I want you to feel the way this moves through your body, Sirius.” Remus experimentally runs the head of the paddle over Sirius’s backside. “I want you to feel it deep inside you.”

And then Remus brings the paddle down, not too hard just yet, and holds it to Sirius’s skin once it lands there. The sound this time is firmer, lower, less vibration and more stillness. He does this several more times, each time holding the paddle still for a moment as it hits flesh, the beat of it thudding through Sirius’s body like thunder.

Sirius has always found this kind of pain to be more manageable, less fun for the sake of pushing boundaries, but tonight it grounds his body into a deep stillness. He feels his knees grow roots and start to sink into the mattress below him.

Remus’s cock fills steadily with blood as the headiness of the experience starts to overcome him, but he ignores it. He focuses all his attention on Sirius, tries to sense what Sirius is feeling and wanting and needing through the connections of bound magic and the entirely non-magical sorcery of knowing someone as completely as the two men know each other. He can feel the tight coils of Sirius’s agony start to unravel a bit and, relieved, he continues. He tries as best he can for a steady rhythm of consistent force, bringing the paddle down again and again with mere seconds in between. Sirius isn’t quite making sound, but he breaths out hard on each blow.

When the breaths start to become particularly harsh, Remus stops to evaluate his work. Sirius’s arse is bright red now, and the muscle-deep strikes of the paddle will leave bruises far below skin surface. He is confident Sirius seems a bit more composed now, the pieces of him starting to come back together.

“That feels better, doesn’t it, Sirius?” He says. Sirius does nod this time, just barely.

The dull pain has brought Sirius back into his body, but his body is not yet back _here_ , in the space. He wants more. He needs more.

Remus regroups. He can’t deny that his arms are starting to ache at the repetitive movement, but he is not done. Sirius is not done. He reaches for another implement he’d placed on the bed earlier, a severe looking flogger with several long, rubber tails. It’s heavier than the paddle, but he won’t have to use as much strength on impact, and sod his aching muscles anyway. He’d tear through them with his own teeth if he thought it would make Sirius feel better.

“I am going to keep going, Sirius. Is that okay?” Remus asks, tone steady and gentle.

Sirius nods. He’s still panting, though it’s quieter now, and sweat has broken out over his back and thighs so his skin reflects the small amount of lamplight in the room. He is beautiful, and Remus takes a moment to admire the stunning, complicated, fragmented man before him.

“Raise yourself onto your hands, Sirius.” Remus orders. “Do you need me to untie your wrists?”

Sirius shakes his head more violently than he’d intended to as he brings himself to rest on the palms of his hands. It’s awkward, but he needs the restriction of the binding as if it is the only thing holding all of him together. Without it, he thinks the pieces of his body and mind and soul will just float away, ghostlike, through the doors and windows and out into the freezing night air.

“Good,” Remus affirms. He places his feet hip-width apart and steadies himself. “Are you ready, Sirius?”

“Please.” It’s a tiny squeak, the first thing Sirius has said since the scene began, and it catches Remus slightly off guard. Nevertheless, it’s not the affirmation they agreed on, and Remus doesn’t fully trust Sirius to be able to extract the proper words from himself.

“Nod your head if you’re ready, Sirius.”

Sirius nods, long, certain movements. The beginning feelings of euphoria are starting to creep in, and he’s chasing them like they’re his only chance for survival.

His eyes are closed still, and Remus’s movements are fluid and quiet, so he doesn’t expect the sharp pang of each rubber tail bounding against the skin of his upper back. He lets out a long, guttural groan, and it reverberates into the room and right through both of their cocks.

Remus shudders a bit at the sound of it, gooseflesh rising from his tailbone to the skin on the back of his neck. “Fuck, Sirius,” He whispers. It’s the first time he’s acknowledged that this is for him too, that he needs to see Sirius come undone and put back together as much as Sirius needs to experience it.

Remus _has_ to hear that groan again, so he brings the flogger against Sirius’s skin in as close to the exact same spot as he can manage. This time, Sirius’s groan tapers off into a protracted whimper. On the third hit, he thinks he hears Sirius begin to sob.

“You’re doing so well, Sirius,” Remus assures him. “So good for me.”

Sirius nods twice, something like a _I only want to be good for you_ and a _you may keep going_ in one.

Remus works his way slowly down Sirius’s back, careful to avoid the lower middle portion guarding his kidneys. Each blow brings the tails down sharply and abruptly, leaving a gorgeous trail of red, angry lines across the sallow skin of the still-too-thin man. By the time Remus has worked his way to the bony protrusions of Sirius’s hips, a few tears have hit the patched duvet under Sirius’s nose. Remus knows this is okay – tears of release rather than distress – because he’s seen them before, and because he trusts Sirius to stop him if it’s too much. He hopes each tear carries in it many times its volume in guilt and trauma and pain, hopes that each hits the bed with the finality of dying out forever.

He assesses the skin of Sirius’s arse once again. The redness is a bit darker now, less vivid as it begins to settle into the bruises that will take its place tomorrow. He can’t help but bring his free hand against the skin, trailing his fingertips over it. He knows what will tip Sirius over the edge he desperately needs to fall from, and takes a moment to consider his capability before deciding.

“Sirius,” he says steadily, still moving his fingers over Sirius’s arse. “I’m going to flog you here. I need you to stay very still for me, so I don’t hurt you. Okay?”

Sirius nods, and the movement causes a few lingering tears to drop onto the bed. He will stay still. He will do whatever Remus tells him to. 

“Good, Sirius.” Remus repositions his body, notices his breath, acknowledges the way his shoulders ache and his cock begs for attention and agrees to attend to them later. Sirius needs him. Sirius is _beautiful_ , all snotty, crying mess and mottled skin, bruising wrists and absolute trust. “Fuck, Sirius. You look incredible right now. You are so good for me, so very good.”

Sirius’s body quivers with a few particularly violent sobs, and Remus waits for him to calm, dropping soft “shh”s and “let it out”s and “I’ve got you”s into the space between them. He rubs his hand soothingly over Sirius’s lower back and holds the space for Sirius to come further undone and bind more securely back together. He waits with all the patience of a man who would have waited forever for Sirius to come back to him, and when Sirius’s sobs ebb again he crouches down on the floor next to the bed and looks up at Sirius’s wet, tear-stained face.

“Do you want me to continue, Sirius?” He asks very gently.

“Yes,” Sirius responds. His voice is clearer now, hoarse from crying but more embodied all the same.

This time Remus doesn’t make him nod too, he can feel the way Sirius’s magic has calmed. He stands, knees crackling as they have done for years now, and takes only a moment to reorient himself before he brings the tails of the flogger down against Sirius’s arse, over the already inflamed skin.

It takes an incredible amount of will for Sirius to stay still. He is calmer, more present, but the rush of endorphins from the consistent pain has flooded his body now and he wants to rock his hips into the bed. His cock is violently hard and purple, precum beading at the tip. His buttocks and back are alternating between a sharp, stinging pain and a deep, dull ache.

“Two more, Sirius.” Remus says. His voice is higher and weaker, tinged with his own arousal. 

Sirius almost objects, the pain and the pleasure are fighting for dominance in his body. But he will take two more, for Remus. “Yes,” He says.

The next blow hurts more than any prior, probably because the nerves of his skin are surface-level and enraged. Sirius keens and bites his lip, but he does not move.

“So good. So close, Sirius.”

The final blow is worthy of a finale, it sends hot fireworks through his whole body that explode somewhere in the region of his aching cock. “Fuckkkkk,” Sirius grunts, and collapses back on his ankles.

He has no idea if it’s ten seconds or three hours later, but Remus has stripped down to his boxers and coaxed Sirius under the blankets. Sirius’s face is buried in Remus’s bare chest, his unbound arms wrapped around Remus’s torso, and Remus is rubbing his back and whispering soft reassurances into his hair.

“You did so well, Sirius. You took that so well. You are here, with me, and you are safe.” Remus repeats some version of this mantra several times, stopping only to place long kisses on Sirius’s sticky forehead.

When the images of the room around him start to come back into focus, Sirius realizes that his cock is still achingly hard. He lifts his head off Remus’s chest just enough to glance at his lover’s kind face, eyes closed peacefully as he continues his ministrations down Sirius’s back. He trails his eyes down the freckled skin of Remus’s torso to the tented fabric of his boxers. Instinctively, he reaches for Remus’s cock.

“It’s okay, Sirius,” Remus says, catching Sirius’s hand in his own. “You don’t need to. We don’t need to do anything else. Just let me hold you.” 

“No, Moony, want…”

He doesn’t know what he wants, exactly. He wants Harry back. He wants to feel helpful. He wants to feel _normal_. He wants to feel Remus come undone the way Sirius has.

“What do you want, Sirius? Tell me, love.”

But Sirius can’t say those things out loud, or doesn’t want to, so instead he climbs into Remus’s lap, straddling him, and kisses him. Remus is holding back, resisting the urge to plunge his tongue into Sirius’s warm, inviting mouth, so Sirius does it for him. They begin rutting their hips against each other slowly, moaning into each other’s mouths.

“Let me suck you, Moony,” Sirius pleads. “Please.”

Remus seems hesitant, that bloody professorial vigilance rearing its ugly head again. Sirius plants an open-mouthed kiss to the spot just behind Remus’s earlobe and grinds his hips down hard over Remus’s cock. Remus’s eyes flutter shut and he bites back a particularly loud groan before relenting with a small nod.

Sirius cherishes the feel of Remus’s skin below him as he kisses his way over healed scars and the delicate trail of hair that disappears under his boxers. He mouths over the hard outline of Remus’s cock through the cloth and Remus squirms beneath him.

“Sirius,” Remus murmurs as Sirius helps him remove his pants and then settles himself comfortably between Remus’s legs. “You’re so…”

The words fade when Sirius takes Remus into his mouth suddenly, trailing his rough tongue over the leaking slit before taking every last inch of Remus’s cock into his throat.

Remus chokes on a gruff moan and throws his head back against the headboard.

“Fuck, Sirius, you… _fuck_.”

The heavy weight of Remus’s cock in his mouth feels so comforting Sirius almost doesn’t want to move at all, wants to hold him just like this and fall asleep with the constriction at his throat and his nose buried in the curls at the base of Remus’s erection. When he starts to feel lightheaded, he finally begins moving, bobbing his head up and down sloppily and growling around the intoxicating taste of sweat and salt and _safe_ and _sanctuary_.

Remus grips Sirius’s unruly black curls, pulling them into a makeshift ponytail at the back of his head so he has a better view of the swollen, pink lips as they work over him and the stark grey orbs that look up at him every so often, communicating _just how much_ Sirius loves this, needs this. Sirius is rutting his hips against the mattress and the sight of him, desperate and horny, causes something to catch in the back of Remus’s throat.

“You’re beautiful,” Remus whispers. Because it’s true. Has never stopped being true.

Sirius’s moans vibrate through Remus’s cock and he knows he won’t last long. He’s been half hard for over an hour and he can just see the flogger marks on Sirius’s shoulders as they move up and down with Sirius’s motions. When Sirius pauses to lick and suck at each of Remus’s balls, Remus lifts himself up on his elbows, running his hands over the swelling welts on Sirius's back in a way that makes him shiver.

“You did so well,” Remus utters reverently. “You’re so strong, Sirius. So brave. So–oh, _fuck_ , _Sirius…_ ”

His cock disappears again into the eager depths of Sirius’s mouth while thin, trembling fingers stroke the skin just under Remus’s balls. Sirius closes his eyes and focuses on the reality of the moment, on the hushed sounds of Remus muttering words of praise and nonsense into the air, on the musky scent of Remus and the salty taste of the precum Sirius laps up eagerly. He’ll come, easily, just from the friction of his own cock against the bed and the way Remus is saying his name, but not yet. Not until Remus does, not until Remus says he can.

“Sirius, love…I’m close…” Remus warns, which only causes Sirius to double down on his efforts, sucking sloppily around hot, hard skin and gripping Remus’s hips as if they are the only things holding him in this moment.

It’s not until Remus covers one of Sirius’s hands with his own that he finally lets go. Bitter cum floods Sirius’s mouth and he holds it on his tongue, reveling in the way it tastes so distinctly of _Remus_ before he swallows it down. Remus jerks his hips a few times, and Sirius sucks him through his orgasm. They lace their fingers together at the junction of Remus’s hips and hold tightly to each other.

Remus goes limp in Sirius’s mouth and he finally lets him go, canting his hips a few more times against the bed before he sits up on his ankles. 

Remus looks dazed, but arousal still dances across his eyes as he watches Sirius’s rock hard cock slap against his belly. Sirius does not touch himself, just looks pleadingly at Remus.

“Do you want to come, Sirius?” Remus is still panting, coming down from his own high.

Sirius nods. “P–please…”

“You deserve it, Sirius. Touch yourself for me, love. Let me see you make yourself come.”

Sirius grips himself around the base of his cock and begins stroking slowly, overstimulated from the events of the night. When he shivers and brings one hand bracingly against Remus’s leg, Remus can’t help himself but sit up and wrap his hand around the back of Sirius’s burning hot neck, bringing Sirius’s forehead to rest on his chest.

“You’ve got it, love,” Remus says, and Sirius can feel the vibration of his words move their way through his forehead and down his spine. The fist around Sirius’s cock is shaking as he chases a release that is both elusive and just within reach. Remus brings his own steady fingers around Sirius’s, and they stroke him together as a few lingering tears fall from Sirius’s eyes again and dribble down Remus’s chest.

“You’re okay, Sirius,” Remus reminds him, because he thinks it might be exactly what Sirius needs to hear. “You deserve to feel good, love. Come on. Come for me.”

And finally, Sirius does, because he won’t deny Remus anything.

His orgasm moves through him with the same energy of the blows against his arse and back, painful and grounding and euphoric all at once. He shudders violently as his release coats both their hands, the feel of the sticky hot substance the last thing he needs to finally land entirely back in his own body.

When Remus has lowered Sirius gingerly into soothing, hot bathwater, he begins moving a cloth gently – so gently – over every inch of Sirius’s body, clearing away cum and sweat and tears. The water swirls with the marbled colors of a few mild healing potions that sink into Sirius’s body and pull each strand of muscle apart, so that by the time the water is drained and Remus is toweling him dry, he feels again like everything is in place, exactly where it should be.

He knows it won’t last but a few days, a few hours even. Enough to fall asleep against the steady thrum of Remus’s heartbeat and glide through a few hours of nightmare-less slumber. But as he drifts easily through the space between wakefulness and sleep, all he knows is that when he comes undone again, Remus will be there to put him back together.

To be continued.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on safe flogging: flogging on the butt and thigh area is ~controversial~ and can be dangerous due to the smaller surface area and increased risk of the tails of the flogger wrapping around the side/hitting the genitals/generally landing where you don’t want them to. We stan Responsible Dom Remus, who evaluates the situation and both his and his partner’s capacity and then proceeds from there. Be like Remus. (Except the whole werewolf thing, that’s not ideal.)


	7. See the Darkness Yielding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s Wednesday, my dudes. (Why have I not been using that as my greeting all this time??)
> 
> That means a new chapter! And, we've come to the end of the fic. I'm a sentimental bitch, so I'm sad about that. But here's how this works: I originally intended on leaving this fic super open-ended re: Sirius's death. But then JKR wouldn't shut the fuck up and I got mad. (If you want to read more about that, I wrote an explanation [here](https://bubbebruja.tumblr.com/post/625644775749697536/on-the-death-of-sirius-black-and-literary-gay), mostly just to get it off my chest.) SO, there is now an epilogue. If you want this story to remain fully canon-complaint, stop after this chapter. If you want a happy ending, proceed to the epilogue. Totally up to you. 
> 
> CWs: Active use of a safeword, and choking. 
> 
> Most importantly, thank you to each and every one of you for taking a chance on a totally unknown writer. Thank you for trusting me with our boys; I hope I did them justice. 
> 
> I'll be writing more things soon, if you're interested, and you can find me on my brand new Tumblr [here](https://bubbebruja.tumblr.com) (seriously, 2020 is a trip).
> 
> And as always, stay safe, wear your masks, wash your hands, and LOVE YOURSELVES. 
> 
> (P.S. Quick safety note: There’s consensual breathplay in this chapter (more specifically, blood choking). It’s done as responsibly and safely as erotic choking can be done, but choking is serious edgeplay and can be super dangerous and even fatal. Nevertheless, it’s a super common kink, and we certainly don’t kink-shame here (I mean…obviously. This fic is one giant kink scene.), but please check out [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwkEBrkK1xY) video for more in-depth information on doing breathplay safely.)

Anchors are terribly misleading things, because they give the illusion of all the freedom in the world, trick you into thinking you can go as far as you’d like, only to halt you entirely when you finally come up against the slack of the chain.

At least, this is how Sirius has begun to think about it.

Grimmauld Place is tethering him to it, like the heaviest anchor in the world. He comes up against the end of the chain far too often, each time he thinks of taking a stroll around the garden, or stands too long at the window, or toys with the idea of walking right out the front door, disobeying all his orders and risking his life and everyone else’s just for the sake of freedom.

He shares this analogy with Remus one night, after Remus has returned from a long shift of guarding the prophecy and Sirius has returned from a long shift of bouncing enchanted walnuts off the parlour ceiling. Remus looks at him as if he has grown a second head.

“Only you could make the concept of an anchor seem stifling, Pads,” he says, looking up from the book he has been reading next to Sirius in their bed. “Anchors are meant to keep boats from floating away, you know, so they don’t wander off and get crushed.”

He says this last part with a pointed look over the top of his reading glasses, a _two can play at this analogy_ look. Sirius huffs but concedes, returns to his very important task of crossing his arms stubbornly over his chest and staring blankly at the wall opposite their bed.

Remus has stopped trying to get him to take up a hobby, painting or reading or calligraphy (“An art invented by ancient Chinese wizards, you know,” Remus says to Sirius one afternoon, thinking it will strengthen his case. It doesn’t.). Sirius refuses. He prefers to play up his suffering, to really commit to it. Somehow, if he passes the time doing anything but thinking about how dreadfully boring it is to pass the time, he’s afraid he’ll lose the outlet for his stubborn, admittedly rather self-indulgent brooding. And he _needs_ that outlet, he needs to play the role of the burdened, afflicted prisoner, the dedicated martyr, because it is one of the only places he has to put the anger.

The anger.

It flares bright and hot inside his chest, his stomach, the space behind his eyes. It makes him brood and sulk and say cruel things, it makes him hate the people he loves and, sometimes, want to join the people he hates. It’s _terrifying_ , this anger. And the truth is, it’s been there for many years. Long before Azkaban, even. It was born somewhere around his earliest memories, grew steadily over his childhood and his time at Hogwarts, and came to a brilliant, blazing fire during the first war. Azkaban just stoked it somehow, just toyed with it, dousing it with petrol and then smothering it with baking soda, firing him up and then giving him no place to house the fire. Emotions were dangerous things in Azkaban – particularly the caustic ones – but the anger never died down. It just grew dormant. And now, in this parody of freedom, it flares again. And he can’t scream, or punch, or throw things, or walk out the bloody front door and fuck the consequences, because he is an _adult_ (or, so Remus keeps reminding him). He has to be “a good example” (or, so Molly keeps reminding him). So, he stares at the walls and blames them for everything wrong, grows to resent them, tries to get them to burn down around him with the flames of his own anger.

Sometimes that doesn’t cut it. 

He slides the sheets further down his bare chest and over his briefs with an innocent stretching motion and lets his hair down from its messy bun. Remus hasn’t looked up from his book yet, though Sirius _knows_ he’s seen. 

He drags one hand down his chest, over his nipples and belly, and trails it lightly over his hardening cock. He strokes himself a few times over the fabric of his pants and closes his eyes just enough that he can still barely see Remus.

Who is now looking up from his book like he’s just spotted his entrée after three days of fasting.

“Padfoot, what are you…” Remus starts to ask, but his mouth goes dry. It’s been a few days, what with the odd hours The Order requires, and that, for them, is a very long time.

“I think you know what I’m doing, Moony,” Sirius teases, biting his lower lip and training his eyes directly on Remus.

Remus closes his book mid-chapter and places it on the bedside table along with his reading glasses. He shifts toward Sirius and watches him intently as he slides his hand under his waistband and lets out a low moan, which Remus reciprocates in turn.

“Can I do that for you?” Remus asks, gesturing with his head.

“Dunno, Moony,” Sirius says. “I know how much you like to watch…”

Remus growls, feeling himself grow warm under his sleep shirt. “Then you’d better give me a clearer view.”

Sirius removes his pants and drops them on the floor beside the bed. He stares directly at Remus as he runs his tongue over his palm, and then grips himself again, bringing his free hand to pinch and play with one of his nipples. He moans showily and spreads his legs, bringing his knees up so Remus can see his balls tighten as he brings himself to full hardness.

Remus removes his own shirt and pants with much less grace than Sirius and turns on his side, propping himself up on his elbow. He starts trailing his own hand over his stomach.

“ _Christ_ , you’re sexy, Pads,” He says, his own cock quickly coming to attention.

“I know,” Sirius replies with a wink that itself is far sexier than it has any right to be.

Remus watches patiently for several moments, while Sirius works himself up enough that his cock starts to drip precum and his chest flushes a soft red. He begins bucking his hips with each thrust of his hand and spreads his legs even wider. He gives Remus a knowing grin and drags his free hand down to stroke the sensitive skin just above his arsehole.

They’ve reclaimed their old dynamic thoroughly enough at this point that Remus says nothing at all, just lets out a predatory growl and climbs right on top of Sirius, grabbing both of his wrists and pinning them to the sides of his body. He holds them there as he captures Sirius’s mouth in a hot kiss that Sirius leans up into, giving every indication that this is exactly the outcome he was hoping for.

“You’re such a fucking tease, Pads,” Remus says into Sirius’s open mouth, before he captures Sirius’s bottom lip in a sharp bite and repeats the motion on Sirius’s chin, down one side of his neck, leaving little bright red marks as he goes.

“Mmhmm,” Sirius agrees, bucking his hips into Remus. His breath catches when Remus takes his earlobe between his teeth. “ _Moony_.”

“Is this what you want, Sirius?” Remus whispers, right into Sirius’s ear. “Do you like to tease me so I’ll mark you all over?”

Sirius moans, deep and slow. He nods, and Remus brings one hand to the side of Sirius’s neck, suggesting, offering…

“Yes, please, choke me, Moony,” Sirius pleads, and he wasn’t even aware that that was exactly what he wanted right now, but Remus is. Remus taps into some network between their bodies, their magic, and pulls from it exactly what Sirius needs.

It is some combination of the perfect friction between their bare cocks and the way Remus’s hand circles so confidently around Sirius’s throat, big and certain and warm, that sends Sirius into some sort of other-world, higher and farther than the real one. Remus’s long fingers dip into the divots on either side of Sirius’s throat, and he thrusts his hips just so, so their cocks send electric bursts of pleasure through each other. He tightens his grip with just enough pressure, and then releases, and tightens again, and releases. The suffocating sensation relaxes Sirius, quiets the anger by starving it of oxygen and blood so that all that’s left is the feeling in his cock and the little white stars that start to pop up behind his eyes.

Their cocks continue to rub together and Remus alternates between biting and licking, all over Sirius’s neck and chest, and it takes very little time at all before Sirius is gasping a moaning and coming, all the blood that rushes back to his brain amplifying every sensation.

Sirius thrusts his hips through his orgasm, his body erupting in small tremors, and Remus doesn’t let up. He removes his hand from around Sirius’s throat and uses it instead to trail over to Sirius’s nipple, pinching it hard while he works his way down Sirius body, lapping up the trail of cum until he reaches Sirius’s softening cock. He licks a firm stripe from base to head, and then takes the whole thing in his mouth, sucking with too much pressure and too many teeth and…

The anger rises again, hijacks the bolts of hot, painful pleasure that shoot from Sirius’s cock to his feet and then right back up again. Sirius breathes through it, grabs a fistful of Remus’s hair and grips, and now Remus is sucking each of his balls into his mouth, and now Remus is dragging his tongue firmly down his perineum, and now Remus is licking greedily at his opening, starting to open him up.

Sirius is in the room. He’s _in the room_ , in his body, feeling the overwhelming excess of sensation coursing through his sensitive, post-orgasmic body. And that, alone, really is something. So Remus breaches his body with two slick fingers, and says his name – “ _Fuck_ , Sirius, you’re always so tight” – and Sirius whimpers something loud and wanting enough that it douses the anger.

“Fuck me, Moony,” He’s saying, “please fuck me. I need you to fuck me.”

Remus works his way back up Sirius’s body and ravages him with a kiss so deep that Sirius can taste himself, musky and sharp. Remus grabs Sirius around his middle and flips him over, pulls him onto to his knees and then sinks into him slowly, letting forth a deep, guttural groan as he does.

Remus begins fucking him, slowly at first, and he’s brushing over Sirius’s prostate and it’s causing involuntary moans of Remus’s name to slip from his lips. His cock is hardening again even though it’s far too soon, and Remus enters and exits his body so competently, so _reverently_.

But. The anger. _The anger_. It sparks fresh in his chest and he swallows, trying to force it down, only for it to rise again like bile and when Remus shifts his hand – brings it to the crease where Sirius’s torso folds into his leg, where a crude tattoo of a small pair of antlers lives – something wakes up, something else that lives there too, something _hothothot_ and not the good kind, something scalding, something that burns like acid instead of fire.

He shuts his eyes tight, pushes back onto Remus’s cock and bites his lip, tries to swallow the bile back down. But it doesn’t matter, because when he opens his eyes again, they are trained directly on the padded chair by the door, on the photograph of his child self that he placed there so that it could finally rest against something soft. He looks into his own eyes and his own eyes stare back at him, crinkle at the edges when he smiles, disappear from sight when little-boy-Sirius turns and walks away from the photographer – from his mother – and Remus is fucking him harder now, gripping his hips and those antlers and the thing that lives there too, and yes he is in his body but he’s sharing it now, with an uninvited guest, with the anger, it’s taken over and now it will never let him go and…

“Hippogriff,” Sirius is saying, though he didn’t tell his mouth to do so. “Hippogriff, hippogriff, hippogriff…”

He keeps chanting the word over and over, even though Remus stopped moving entirely on the first syllable of the first utterance. It is a “fuck you” to the anger, it is a protest chant, a reminder that nothing can have his body but his own soul, that he and Remus gave each other the gift of this trust _years_ ago and it is unexchangeable, nonrefundable, impenetrable by even the most corrosive of things.

“ _Padfoot_ ,” Remus is saying, and he’s eye to eye with Sirius somehow, crouching on the floor by the bed where Sirius has collapsed back onto his ankles and is crying silent, wracking sobs. Remus is stroking his fingers lightly over Sirius’s forearm, resting his chin atop his hand which is flat on the bed so that he truly is, quite literally, eye to eye with Sirius. He’s silent, just looking patiently at Sirius who can barely see him back through tearful, blurry eyes. His fingers on Sirius’s forearm stroke so gently, so tenderly, conveying so much more than could ever really be spoken.

Incomplete thoughts form in Sirius’s head before becoming exhausted and trailing off, and one of them is that he’s probably worried Remus more than he ever has before. He’s never, he’s _never_ , so much as thought about using his safe word, too stubborn and too proud and too truly up for anything. _And yet_ , the incomplete thoughts say, _Remus reminds you of it over and over_. And Remus _doesn’t_ seem overly worried, actually, doesn’t seem frightened or angry or disappointed. He’s just… _there_. And suddenly Sirius realizes that Remus is, in every meaning of the phrase, willing to meet him wherever he is. And the thought is so reassuring, so stiflingly beautiful, that he lunges at Remus, wraps his arms around Remus’s neck and – he didn’t mean to, but gravity being what it is – pushes Remus to the floor and lands on top of him, like an animal that’s just pounced on its prey.

Only he feels nothing but love, gratitude and honor and, still, anger, but they’re all facing off now. They’re in a fight to the death, so Sirius just clings to Remus, just holds him tight around the shoulders and presses his face into Remus’s neck so firmly he can actually feel Remus’s pulse below his skin, the rapid _ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump_ that means the person who loves him most is alive.

Remus – bless him – recovers quickly from being pummeled to the floor and wraps his own arms around Sirius’s torso, just as tightly. When Harry was first born, Lily gave Sirius and Remus an introductory lesson on baby care. She showed them how to swaddle Harry tightly in any one of the multitude of baby blankets the Potters had received as gifts, and Sirius was so concerned he nearly snatched Harry away, _“You’re going to strangle him, Lily!”_ But Lily – bless her, too – with her bleary eyes and leaking breasts, just explained to Sirius that newborns like this; it reminds them of the womb. And that’s what Sirius is thinking of now, holding on for dear life to Remus and Remus holding him right back. Maybe all the little boy in the photograph needed was to be held so tightly that he remembered he once lived inside someone else too, was once loved so much that she shared her body and oxygen and blood with him. 

Remus readjusts himself on the floor so they are leaning against the wall, right next to the chair on which little-boy-Sirius sits, and Sirius straddles him, keeps his face buried in Remus’s neck, and he really wishes he could stop crying. He feels tiny and stupid and babyish and maybe that’s exactly the point, maybe he’ll stop crying when he lets the little boy in the photograph back inside his body, when he stops hearing his mother’s voice – “ _Crying is for babies and girls, Sirius, and you are neither”_ – and starts hearing Remus’s – “You’re safe, Sirius. You’re here. It’s okay.”

No, when he starts hearing _his own_ voice, when he can internalize what Remus says and finally take it bloody seriously and recognize that Remus can only love him so far if he refuses to love himself right back.

It is something about this thought that calms him, and he lets out one final, shuddering breath, right into Remus’s shoulder along with the accumulated tears and snot. Remus summons a box of tissues, and Sirius cleans himself and the evidence of his tears off his lover, and he thinks maybe he can see the tiny flames of some of the anger, hidden inside those teardrops and gone for good.

* * *

“You know we have to do something about this, Sirius.”

He says it the way parents explain vaccinations to a child: tenderly, calmly, explaining that the things that hurt us are sometimes the things that protect us later, that they will hold onto that perspective for the child and the child can go right on being scared.

Remus is still stroking his back. Sirius has been drifting in and out of sleep against Remus’s chest for several hours now, and Remus hasn’t yet slept a wink. But Sirius is awake now, and he hears Remus, and he does not feel attacked or judged or like Remus is telling him _he_ is a problem. He hears Remus say, “there are other ways to live”. And he lets Remus hold onto that perspective for him, so he can go right on being scared.

The next morning, Sirius wakes first and removes his sticky cheek from Remus’s sternum. Remus’s chest hair has left squiggly indentations on his face and all the blankets have been kicked to the bottom of the bed, the combination of muggy April air and their body heat making them unnecessary. He dons his dressing gown and heads towards the washroom to freshen up before he goes down to the basement kitchen to make him and Remus breakfast. He’ll bring it to Remus in bed, but he won’t wake Remus up. If he knows his lover – and, he does, very well – he knows that Remus was probably up most of the night, listening to the slow in-and-out of Sirius's breathing and watching the rise and fall of Sirius's chest. 

As he begins loading two plates of food and a pot of tea onto the tray to take upstairs, he does something very odd. He recognizes it’s odd, he’s not completely lost his marbles cooped up in the dreary old house, but he does it anyway. He places a third teacup on the tray, and when he reaches their bedroom again and opens the cracked door with his foot, he places the third cup on the chair, in front of the photograph. And then, like children playing Tea Party, he fills the cup, only a little, and he drops a single cube of sugar and a generous pour of cream into the cup too, because that’s how he used to like his tea when he was a child. And he leaves it there, placing a warming charm on it, so it doesn’t grow cold and leave sugary residue on small Sirius’s teeth. He walks to the bed and places the tray gently so as not to wake Remus, and he doesn’t feel the need to so much as glance back at the chair.

He eats his own breakfast in silence and is about to take his dishes to the kitchen to wash up when Remus stirs.

“Is this for me?” Remus asks as he stretches luxuriously and then gestures to the tray. His voice is hoarse from sleep (and maybe also from crying). 

“Always the best for my Moony,” Sirius replies, and even to his own ears he sounds a little nervous.

But Remus just grins at Sirius, gives him a peck on the cheek and a “thank you” and pours himself a cup of tea – just cream for him – before beginning his own breakfast. He chews slowly and Sirius watches as the toast gets smaller and the eggs are all scooped up, content to just watch Remus eat, nourish himself, live. He brings his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them, shielding his heart from what he’s afraid is going to happen next.

“So…last night,” Sirius begins, because he’s braver now than he was at age three, and three-year-olds are rather brave.

Remus wipes the corners of his mouth with a napkin and settles back against the pillows. He gestures for Sirius to come closer. Sirius does, but he places a pillow in front of his lap so his heart is still protected, and his organs too, anything that could be easily wounded.

“Yes, last night,” Remus begins, fatigue creeping into his voice. “Thank you, Sirius.”

Sirius tilts his head to the side, Padfoot even when he is not. “For what?”

“For telling me when you needed me to stop.”

They are both silent for a moment, just looking at each other. Sirius remembers the first time they established safewords, meticulous young Remus making sure they did everything by the book. He remembers not caring what the bloody safeword was, because he wasn’t going to use it anyway, but humoring Remus nonetheless. He remembers the last time he was back in the shack – that place where they created this little symbol of radical trust – and the way everything was so very different, so dirty and dark and damp and lonely. He nods, an acknowledgement of the symbol, of the trust.

“Do you feel like you can talk to me about what happened?” Remus asks.

“I…I’m not completely sure,” Sirius replies, honestly.

“Did I do something – say something – that crossed a boundary, Padfoot?”

Sirius shakes his head. “No. It wasn’t you. It was…”

The teacup sitting on the chair is still steaming, fogging up the bottom half of the glass inside the frame. Sirius gestures to it.

Remus follows his gaze. “The picture?”

Sirius nods. “I don’t know what happened, Moony. You were just…and then I looked over at it, and it was like something just boiled over.”

Remus reaches out to clasp Sirius’s hand and give it a reassuring squeeze. “Did it make you uncomfortable? To see yourself, while we…”

“No,” Sirius replies, “It’s not quite that. It’s just that…Moony…sometimes I get so _angry_. And I don’t really know why. Well…I guess I know why. But it’s like it takes over and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

There is silence, a nod from Remus, an _I know_ and _I’ve seen it_ and _I hear you_. And then he asks a question that is bigger than either of them are expecting.

“Is that why you like it when I’m rough with you, sweetheart?” Remus asks. “Do you feel like you… _deserve_ it?”

Sirius considers it, really considers it, and _maybe_. Maybe that’s exactly why he likes it. Maybe he thinks he deserves it, or he wants to feel physical pain to distract him from the emotional pain, or he just likes the loud buzzing in his ears when he’s slapped or choked or fucked hard. Maybe he needs the way it drowns out everything else. But then again, any number of things can drown out the voices in his head - alcohol and marijuana and sleep and hot baths - so why this?

He’s never questioned it before, never bothered asking “why” and only ever asking “when” and “where” and “how”. And the truth is?

“Maybe.”

Remus nods.

Tears well up inside Sirius again. Because what if that _is_ why he likes the things he likes? What if that’s why being spanked and degraded and roughed up makes him feel so good, because he’s got feelings so strong they have created demons inside of him that can’t be exorcised by him alone? What if the only reason he feels _so good_ when he’s tied up or choked or fisted is because, for so long, pain was the only thing love ever felt like? What does that say about him? What does that say about the things he likes? And – oh Merlin, no – what does that say about him and Remus?

He’s mid-panic, anger flaring, heart racing. And then Remus is speaking, and he comes up against the slack of the chain.

“Do you remember,” Remus begins, “that day in our dorm at Hogwarts? When you showed me that Muggle leather magazine?” He’s still holding Sirius’s hand absentmindedly but he’s staring unfixed at the wall, looking at something only he can see.

Sirius nods, the tears ebbing a bit at memories that are only good and the fact that he can still remember them at all.

“I was so embarrassed, at the time.” Remus chuckles, genuinely.

“You were shit at talking about sex then, Moony,” Sirius replies. “You’ve rather gotten better at it.”

“It wasn’t that though, Pads,” Remus says pensively, eyes still trained on the wall. “I thought I’d been…found out.” He glances back at Sirius, who is looking at him questioningly. He smiles, because it’s silly. Now, he knows it’s silly, that human sexuality is what it is for reasons no mortal could ever fully understand. But back then? “I thought you’d figured out that I had certain…desires. I thought you were going to think I was some sort of deviant monster and break up with me.”

“Remus…I would _never_ –”

“I know that, Sirius. Now, I know that. But I was so _ashamed_ of the things I wanted to do.”

“You thought it was because you’re a werewolf,” Sirius says. Sometimes Sirius can tap into that network of magic between them, too.

Remus nods.

“It was my biggest secret,” He says. And Sirius can’t help but smile, because Remus is a man of so very many secrets. “I wasn’t ever going to tell _anyone_.”

“But you know that’s not why,” Sirius rushes to reassure him. “You know it has nothing to do with…Moony, you know you’re not _wrong_ or cruel or anything, just because…”

He trails off, because he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Just because he likes hitting people? Just because having all the power turns him on? Just because sometimes he climbs on top of Sirius and growls and it sounds so very much like the wolf, and that’s part of what makes it hot?

“But you see,” Remus says, and he’s making the oddest sort of face; a grimace, almost, but a resigned one. “I think that _is_ why, Padfoot. Part of the reason, at least. I think…” He sighs. He doesn’t like saying this next part. “I think I hate the wolf so much that the only way to deal with it is to… _act_ like him, sometimes. When I can control it and I want to do it, and when someone else wants to do it with me. And then it’s _fun_ , and it feels good and it makes other people feel good, and then it’s like…”

“Like you’ve won.”

Remus nods, and the grimace turns into a grin, small but perceptible to someone who has spent years looking at his face, memorizing every line and scar and expression.

Their bodies, their magic, their very souls connect. And it’s the feeling you get when you tell someone a deep secret and they in turn tell you three of their own. It’s the feeling you get when you’re overcome with something you can’t name, and then a song or a poem or a person names it for you. It’s being _seen_. 

So Sirius cries, and maybe he’ll hate himself for it later, but for now it is okay. Remus isn’t crying – because he doesn’t, much – but he looks Sirius right in the eye, really _sees_ him, so he might as well be crying too.

“Do you think it’s wrong, then, Moony?” Sirius asks, not because he doesn’t know the answer but because he needs to hear it. “Do you think…if we wouldn’t have, otherwise…do you think we would still… _do this_?”

Remus doesn’t ever speak without thinking. So he thinks, and he speaks.

“I think sometimes there are things we wouldn’t need if life hadn’t happened the way it happened. But, it _did_ happen that way. And I think…I think we can spend forever analyzing the difference, or we could just accept that we are beings very prone to change. And do the things that make us feel good. No matter _why_ they feel good. Just because they feel good.”

And that’s good enough. He kisses Remus on the lips, tender and long, and sips some of Remus’s tea, wishing it had more sugar.

* * *

In the end, it is still about chains.

Anchors can keep you from floating away, or they can drown you. It depends on who throws them, and where. It depends on the depth of the water and the density of the silt at the bottom, on the weight of the metal and the shape of the crown. Mostly, though, it depends on the length of the chain, on how much space the anchor puts between itself and its host. Too little, and the boat sinks along with it. Too much, and the boat drifts, risks colliding with land or ship or violent wave. And so they must balance, must pull against each other, must be allowed enough leeway that the line slackens, that both anchor and ship remember their reliance on each other.

And then, when it’s time to move again – and what is the point of boats, if not for traveling? – the anchor lifts. It gets to be carried for a while, has its fissures welded back to smoothness, lets the boat go where it may. It is temporary, as everything is, boats cannot float forever. They must dock, refuel and rest and let their own cracks be patched. The anchor drops, and holds it there, letting it be mended, and it is in so doing that both retrieve their purpose. They do not heal each other, but they allow each other to be healed. They do not need each other, but they allow each other to be needed. For without the anchor, the boat would drift right off the side of the earth, but without the boat the anchor would be deadweight at the bottom of the sea.

So they are chained. To each other. To gravity.

And it’s enough. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title note: Just a reminder – The fic title and all chapter titles are from Leonard Cohen’s “Come Healing”. Elayna Boynton’s version is better. It can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOgLZkJC99g), or on the soundtrack to the film “The Farewell”.


	8. Epilogue: An Undivided Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This epilogue is being posted at the same time as [chapter seven](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24904822/chapters/62494417), so be sure to read that first. (If you want. I'm not your Dom.)

They go to therapy.

It’s not glamorous or sexy or even sometimes tolerable, but they do it, every week, for years.

Sirius stays cooped up in Number Twelve Grimmauld Place for a few years more, learns to cook well enough that he can prepare meals for The Order. Snape makes fun of him for it, and he learns to not mind. He actually _does_ take up calligraphy, and he writes long, pretty letters to Remus, who continues going on dangerous missions right up until the end. One ends so badly that he winds up in Saint Mungos for three weeks, unconscious for two of them. There are a few weddings, and many more funerals. They almost break up a few times, when things start to feel too much like the first war, but instead they yell and scream and fight and make up and fuck and have tea. 

As with all things, the war ends.

They recreate Grummauld Place in their own image, paint it warm yellows and blues and adorn the windows with crimson instead of emerald and move the kitchen out of the basement. They grow a huge garden, long enough to place a cobblestone path right down the middle, and Remus takes pictures of Sirius as he frolics in the wildflowers and devours the smells of honeysuckle and lavender, and each one captures pain and sorrow and joy and love. 

Harry moves in with them for a while and they find him a therapist of his own. They wrap his emotional wounds and tend his invisible trauma and remind themselves that they were once so small, so young and overwhelmed, and the similarities are such that they mend some of their own invisible wounds in the process of mending Harry’s. He gets better, slowly, and begins to accept that he won’t ever be completely healed, and so they accept it too.

Remus’s cottage gets rented out (although they never collect the rent) to a young couple who were imprisoned in Azkaban during the war. They paint the cracking walls and plant tulips in the garden bed out front and get a dog, who wanders around the backyard and chases ducks.

One day in August, over a year after the Battle of Hogwarts, Remus points out that it’s the anniversary of the day they returned to Grimmauld Place again, after several significant weeks spent meandering about the cottage that is no longer really either of theirs. Sirius gets irritated, wonders why Remus would bring up such a thing, and Remus smiles at him with characteristic calmness and tells him, “So you can see how far you’ve come.” And he _has_ come far, eons really, so he doesn’t think before he kneels on one knee, cushioned a bit better now by more retained fat, and asks Remus to marry him. And Remus reminds him that cannot _actually_ do that and calls Sirius a “romantic fool” and beams anyway when he lifts Sirius off the floor and kisses him against the wall.

On the night of the ceremony they hold in their garden, with only closest friends present, they kiss and grope each other up the now whitewashed staircase and lose their clothes along the way. They stumble through the doorframe of their bedroom – the same one they stayed in when they first returned to the haunted house – and the only things that haunt their room now are fresh-cut flowers and two Orders of Merlin, First Class. They stare at each other, both realizing that they don’t know exactly how to consummate this one specific milestone in the biography of their relationship. Finally, Remus sits down on the bed, resting his back against the headboard, and he gestures Sirius to him. Sirius crawls on all fours, all sex and seduction and power, and they kiss. For a long time, they just kiss.

Then, Remus flushes a bit, holds his hands out in front of Sirius like they are the final and most precious thing he has to offer, and looks Sirius in the eye, amber to gray.

“Tie me up, Sirius.”

And Sirius recognizes what is happening, the sacredness of the offering, and he does. He ties Remus up and he sucks Remus off and he fucks him slowly, making Remus ask permission before he comes.

When they finish - when they both come down from astronomical highs and Remus has reminded Sirius (whose never once been on this end of things) to untie his wrists - they lay down next to each other in bed and they say “I love you” and they don’t say much else. They look at each other. They look at the space around them. They look across the room, over at the dresser against which a young Remus Lupin once fucked a young Sirius Black the day before the worst day of their lives. And above it, on the wall where they finally got out a hammer and a level and nailed a hook into the stud and hung a photograph there.

A child with lavish dress robes and piercing gray eyes smiles at them from a picture frame made of solid gold. They smile back. And then the child turns from them, towards the endless pathway awaiting him, and walks away.

End. 


End file.
